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BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 



Works by 
DR. ALBERT DURRANT WATSON, F. R. A. S. C. 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CHARACTER 
LOVE AND THE UNIVERSE (Poems) 
THE IMMORTALS (Poems) 
HEART OF THE HILLS (Poems) 
THE TWENTIETH PLANE (Reported) 
THE COMRADES OF JESUS 



BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 



The ethics of The Twentieth Plane 



A Revelation 



Received Through the Psychic Consciousness 

of 
LOUIS BENJAMIN 



Reported by 
ALBERT DURRANT WATSON, M.D.,F.R. A.S.G. 

Reported of "The Twentieth Plane" — A psychic Revelation, etc. 
Ex-President of the Royal Astronomical Society of 
Canada and of the Association of Psychical Re- 
search for Canada, etc. 

NEW YORK 
THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY 

1920 






Copyright 1920 by 
THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY 

All Rights Reserved 



NOV 20 1920 



Printed in U. S. A. 



g)CI.A60l651 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Reporter's Explanation of the Revelation 1 

Preface ........ 11 

Prologue ...... Tolstoi 17 

Statement of Samuel Taylor Coleridge . . 19 
The Memory of One Who Dwells in the 

Heaven World .... Coleridge 23 

Facts in Evidence ...... 25 

Sleep: Its Power and Uses . . . .47 

Beauty of Body Through Soul . . Sappho 53 
The Soul as Touched by Earth and 

Heaven ..... Savonarola 63 

The Over-Consciousness . . . Emerson 75 

The Mind of Man .... Coleridge 85 

Your Question and the Answer ... 91 

The Heart of the Maternal Mary Youle Watson 105 
The Children's Party . . . . .119 
The Focustng of God's Personality Through 

Man ..... Vrummond 139 

The Re-Birth of the Re-Born Soul Schopenhauer 145 
The Aura of Being . . . . . .153 

The Essence of Government .... 157 

Inaugural for the New Age . . Lincoln 167 

The Vision of Life Through Psychic Eyes . 173 
The Mystery of the Earth Plane Girl 

Dorothy Wordsworth 182 

Composing Life Music .... Bach 195 

That Which Music Taught Me . Paganmi 199 

The Literature of God , 209 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Neologism Coleridge 216 

Veiled Pain .... Shakespeare 219 

The Monoatom .... Crookes 223 

Incidental Observations ..... 237 

Meditations ....... 24*1 

Messages of Fifty-five Minds Through One Soul 245 

The Gift of Healing .... Still 259 

The Element of Worth in Poetry . Blake 263 

Sapphic Fragments ...... 266 

Thought-Born Jewels ..... 273 

The Journey of Death . . . Wilcox 282 

Life Phases ....... 285 

The Three Powers. An Impromptu Drama 

in Three Acts .... Anonymous 297 

The Wisdom of Mystery . . . Coleridge 324 

Episodes of the Sublime ..... 329 

The Joy of Grief .... Coleridge 348 

A Little Journey to the Home of Jesus Hubhard 354 

Comments ..... The Reporter 359 



BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 



THE REPORTER'S EXPLANATION OF 
THE REVELATION 

The matter contained in this book was received 
psychically. It was spoken in trance by one whose 
own thought did not direct his speech. No physical 
apparatus was used at any time while receiving it, 
either by him or by us. It was all spoken in the 
light. Some chapters were communicated in full 
daylight, as in the case of the chapters by Savonarola, 
Emerson, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, all of which 
were spoken to about one hundred and fifty people 
in a public hall on Sunday afternoons. Others were 
dictated in artificial light subdued by exclusion of the 
yellow and blue rays. Always, the light was clear 
and strong enough for the stenographers. 

Much of the matter was dictated slowly and 
written down by the reporter. The rest was taken 
stenographically by two members of the Inner Circle 
(Edith Brock, the stenographer of the Twentieth 
Plane, and Bertram Jackes) , to both of whom, for the 
faithful devotion of their time and skill, we are deeply 
indebted. All the communicated matter was revised 
twice by the unseen authors. The reporter read the 
chapters aloud, in the presence, usually, of some 
members of the Inner Circle, and the entranced In- 
strument whose voice was the medium of correction, 
as it had previously been the medium of dictation. 

Basing his conclusion upon a great mass of cor- 



2 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

respondence, as well as upon his observation of the 
effect on the members of the Inner Circle, the re- 
porter assures the reader that this volume, if accepted 
reverently, will reconstruct his character and be 
epoch-making in his history. It will conduce to the 
health and beauty of the body and to the serenity 
and vision of the soul. A Canadian soldier, home 
from France, said to me : "I went overseas profess- 
ing to be a Christian. I came back with no religion. 
The Twentieth Plane has started me in a new life." 
Another writes: "I have just finished reading the 
book and find it the greatest ever given through a me- 
dium of our time." A physician in the West writes : 
"These messages from the masters have been a source 
of great blessing to me. I feel that I have entered 
a new lif e that can never be the same." Another says : 
"The heart of our race is craving for more." An- 
other: "I am sounding the sentiment of many thou- 
sands who are reading your book and in silence hop- 
ing and praying for more." So persistent is this note 
that further quotation would grow monotonous. 

The reporter — a physician in active practice — has 
observed many persons, gradually but notably, in- 
crease in health and life interest under the influence 
of the teaching of this Revelation. 

Many terms recur frequently in this volume, such 
as: "love," "illumination," "light," "path," "God," 
"physical plane," "earth plane," "astral body," etc. 
The use of these words relieves the text of a burden 
of repeated explanations. The Revelation could 
hardly have been written without them. 

Many letters from all over the world earnestly 



THE REPORTERS EXPLANATION 3 

praying for further teaching from the same source have 
led the reporter to believe that this is by far the most 
important work of his life. This conviction led him, 
despite the kindly solicitude of literary advisers, to 
spend over two years in this work. To have failed 
to respond to such an appeal would have made him 
feel like a traitor to the cause of God and humanity. 

The Revelation is preeminently constructive. It 
is not a new system of religion, but it calls for a re- 
allegiance of the finite personal soul to the Infinite 
Mind who is God. It is not intended to be the basis 
of a new formulary of belief, yet it secures no vindi- 
cation because of its agreement with any other state- 
ment or interpretation of truth ancient or modern. 
It refuses to be tried by the intellect but makes its 
final appeal to history and the human heart. It is 
inspired, but, like all our treasures of revelation, we 
have it in earthen vessels, therefore it is not infallibly 
transmitted, even if infallibly inspired, which also, it 
does not claim to be. It does not compare itself with, 
much less does it contrast itself with or seek to sup- 
plant, any other revelation. 

This volume will supply to many a bewildered 
mind a saner view of life and destiny than was em- 
bodied in the crude tenets of earlier days, tenets which 
have lost their power, through too literal application, 
with the thinking people of this age. We need a liv- 
ing faith to anchor us to the great foundations of re- 
ligious thought, under a divine-human Leader who 
makes little demand as to what we shall believe about 
the origin of His being or the nature of His work, 
but who insists that we shall keep God's great 



4 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

commandment and listen to His unfailing word. 

The reporter is not the author of this revelation in 
any sense whatever. Its thoughts, its forms of liter- 
ary expression, are not his. Accuracy demanded the 
presentation of the work as given and revised by its 
authors and not in conformity with the literary tastes 
of the reporter ; the latter, therefore, disclaims all re- 
sponsibility for creating, either in thought or litera- 
ture, any of the contents of this revelation. 

It is necessary to explain here just what is meant 
by the Inner Circle. It is a group investigating the 
highest form of psychic communication which we be- 
lieve the Revelation to be. Each member of the 
Inner Circle had, in the beginning, no more convic- 
tion of authenticity than the most skeptical reader. 
Their conviction, which is now of an unchangeable 
nature, came as the result of the profound impression 
made on them as the nature of the Revelation became 
deeper and more apparent. 

The members of the Inner Circle were, each of 
them, called members by the Twentieth Plane after 
all doubts had vanished from their minds and they 
were found, by their presence at meetings and 
through their faith, to assist materially in creating the 
delicate psychical conditions requisite for the work. 
The principle of the Inner Circle is that of disciple- 
ship, and its members are really disciples of a great 
truth. All this the Inner Circle means. Perhaps 
nothing greater could be meant. 

The individual members of the Inner Circle, for 
reasons of temperament, personality, environment, 
relationship, etc., came without effort on the part of 



THE REPORTER'S EXPLANATION 5 

anyone into the earth plane group, and none of them 
were selected by any individual in authority in a 
definite way. We left the problem of Inner Circle 
membership to work itself out, and, according to the 
directions of the communicating intelligences, the re- 
sult has been the formation of a group that has risen 
to the demands of such an exacting law of love. 

The world will ask what effect this Revelation has 
had upon the life and character of the members of 
the earth plane Inner Circle. That Circle consists 
now of twenty-nine persons, ten women and nineteen 
men. Apart from their work in this Revelation, they 
represent the average of intelligent humanity. Nine 
are in professional life, and of these two are eminent 
clergymen, four are doctors and three are teaching in 
school or college. Seven are in business. Five are 
students, and of these, three are in the university. 
Two are musicians well known in the musical world. 
Four are engaged in home and industrial pursuits. 
One is an architect and one, a Canadian Senator. 

All these would, I am sure, endorse the statement 
that they are now living a richer life because of the 
experience in this Revelation. Several of them have 
greatly improved in physical health, and no one of 
them has the least reason to regret his association with 
this work. In every case, faith in the genuineness of the 
Revelation has increased and is at present increasing. 

The reporter of this volume has practised medicine 
in Toronto, Canada, for thirty-six years and is still 
actively engaged in that work. For many years he 
has taken a deep interest also in literature, astronomy, 
sociology and religion. The reporting of this Reve- 



6 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lation has not lessened any of these interests. It 
simply meant that for two years he devoted all his 
leisure to this work. He knows that where, previous 
to this experience, he might help one soul, he can 
now help many and lead them out of darkness under 
the guidance of God, into the light and joy of the 
religious life. He regards the opportunity to spend 
time and labour in the furtherance of this Revelation 
as the most treasured privilege of his earth life. 

The Instrument of the Twentieth Plane, Louis 
Benjamin, who is also the Instrument of the present 
work, is an American by birth. He came to Canada 
when six years of age. His entire schooling consists 
of three or four years in the public school. He may 
be said to be self-educated. The reporter has known 
him for over twenty years as a soul studious and alert, 
a seeker after knowledge. No one was more sur- 
prised than the reporter when, two years ago, his 
young friend's psychic development made this Reve- 
lation possible. As to the effect this work has had on 
the Instrument, it may be well for the reporter to 
quote as he can with the approval and confirmation of 
his own judgment, the words of the Twentieth Plane, 
received February twenty-second, nineteen twenty : 

"In reference to the effect of psychic work upon 
your Instrument, Louis Benjamin, we have to say 
that he stands now, when the communications are 
nearly finished and the Revelation complete, a per- 
fectly normal physical and mental being. He has re- 
fused those monetary bribes which would have made 
him a professional medium. Early in the work of 
receiving the Revelation, we told you that if the In- 



THE REPORTER'S EXPLANATION 7 

strument, Louis Benjamin, was faithful to the com- 
mission, the experience would mean to him more than 
a university education. All who know him on the 
earth plane — we who know him here, say that he is 
now — and this is compensation for his labor — one 
who has a consciousness which is a phase of Twentieth 
Plane life, enabling him, with calm deliberation, to 
state truth in language of accurate force; to be at 
times when speaking in public an inspirational 
genius; to understand, above all else, that the mind 
that is pure, the brain that is normal, the vision that 
is broad, develops a personality such as makes his life, 
as it will be increasingly, an example of Twentieth 
Plane revelation. We commend the fearlessness and 
serenity with which he has steered his course through 
prejudice, discouragement, and a thousand difficulties 
which only one born to the work could have withstood." 

It is necessary for the reporter to add only a word 
to this statement. For many months, none realized 
the lofty and solemn nature and purport of the work. 
There were moments when some of us were critical 
and impatient. The Instrument, often in opposition 
to w T hat was apparently his best interest, resisted, in 
every instance, the numerous pleadings that he would 
commercialize his psychic gift. Had he taken a dif- 
ferent course, I do not think he could have escaped 
deteriorating influences. He is engaged in com- 
mercial life and has been able to employ only his week 
ends in this work. 

It seems necessary, in view of calculated and per- 
sistent misrepresentation, to reiterate the statement 
that this book is a Revelation, and that only for that 



8 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

imperative reason does it regard communication 
through a medium with deceased personalities as 
justifiable. Scientific research is of a similar nature 
and has a similar warrant. This Revelation does not 
advocate and the Twentieth Plane does not approve 
the employment of professional mediums for the 
purpose of securing messages of a merely personal 
and selfish nature. When loved ones find a way 
to communicate with us, it is right to listen, but 
we should not initiate any effort to speak to souls 
on higher planes about matters of mere personal 
moment. 

I am directed by the Twentieth Plane to quote 
here, so that there may be no further misunderstand- 
ing of the matter, the question asked and answered 
on page 92, in the chapter: "Your Question and the 
Answer." It reads as follows: 

What is the difference between the Twentieth Plane and 
Spiritualism? 

Ans.: "The difference between the Twentieth Plane and 
Spiritualism depends absolutely on discrimination. To leave 
selfishness out of one's questions and not make them per- 
sonal in the materialistic sense; to believe that the teaching 
of the Twentieth Plane is a revelation and not merely a 
personal direction or instruction; this constitutes the chief 
difference between the ordinary objectionable practices from 
which Spiritualism is npw endeavouring to free itself and the 
communication that flows through from the Twentieth 
Plane." 

Every age has a voice and speaks to all succeeding 
ages. In former days one individual spoke the fate- 



THE REPORTERS EXPLANATION 9 

ful word to his times, now humanity speaks, and the 
individual is subordinate to his age. The warrior is 
no longer the world's greatest hero. Looking at the 
panorama of the last thousand years, we see the Nor- 
mans bring their culture to the British Island. The 
social forces of the thirteenth century give place to 
an individualism which inspired world-adventure and 
discovery. An equal boldness explored new con- 
tinents of thought in wider fields of experience. 
Spiritual leaders followed. Then came the march of 
science and materialism. During one hundred and 
fifty years industrial art made more progress than 
was achieved in the previous three thousand years. 
Our great-grandfathers were born into a civilization 
much like that of the times of Abraham. They could 
travel no faster. Their lives were still set in a frame 
of spacious loneliness of forest and sky, and the sea 
was still phantom-haunted. 

The materialism of the nineteenth century brought 
the world-tragedy to our doors which will end on 
earth the reign of the spoiler. Humanity stood be- 
wildered, mute, wonder-stricken, on the threshold of 
a new age. Fear had become a prayer. Earth, a 
helpless child, lay weeping in the lap of time. The 
period was ripe for a new divine voice. Heaven 
opened her treasures to earth. The Mother-God 
took humanity by the hand, and is now leading her 
child into a more spacious house of life, — into a 
spiritual age. 

"The Twentieth Plane" was introductory to the 
present volume which completes the revelation at this 
time. But no revelation is ever complete. The soul, 



10 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

here and hereafter, will have its beautiful surprises, 
for we are not made omniscient by physical death. 

On reading this volume with its new interpretations 
of life, some will be jealous for the older and more 
generally accepted interpretations. The reporter re- 
gards religious faith established in life and experi- 
ence as the most precious heritage of the race. Such 
a faith will not be disturbed by this revelation, but 
many a soul that has lost its anchorage to faith will 
be restored by reading these pages. Some older in- 
terpretations may be supplanted, but this will always 
involve a better understanding of the real truth- 
foundations. Here are the great doctrines of a 
divine-human Christ; of the salvation of the world 
through love-sacrifice ; of spiritual rebirth and cleans- 
ing from sin ; of responsibility for character and con- 
duct ; of the penetential valley on every plane of lif e ; 
and, explaining and including all, the doctrine of one- 
ness with the All-Father, and the consequent impossi- 
bility of really separating, by death or any other means, 
two souls who deeply and intensely love one another. 

The Revelation has led and will lead many a reader 
back from the barren fields of doubt to renewal of 
childlike faith in the foundation principles of religious 
life. It will make the reader far more conscious of 
the realities of the soul, and clear, in many particulars, 
the horizons of his thought. By far the greatest gift 
this Revelation has for any reader is the power to 
realize his oneness with the Universe, and his conse- 
quent right to share in the covenant of its highest in- 
spirations. 



PREFACE 

Dictated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

The divine purpose of this book is to convey to 
the reader the long-prayed-for evidence that com- 
munication between earth and the planes of the 
heavens is re-established* Spirit communication has 
always been a fact, yet there have been long dearth- 
seasons when it has been impeded and all but 
strangled. 

As another consideration, this book has the object 
in view of giving to you — not with a great deal of 
earth plane intellectual proof that appeals to the 
five senses — the realization that any message made 
up of the ingredients of truth is its own witness, 
its own evidence, and requires no external props of 
extraneous half truths with which to build an edifice 
of uncontaminated fact. 

To write a book on spirit communication in which 
the authors sought to convince through the evidence 
of the earth plane court room, we consider an insult 
to your age. The messages in this book are of such 
a nature that they are the voice of soul converse. 
They are a portion of divine consciousness en rapport 
with your inner divine consciousness. This will be 
understood by means of an example of the very form 
of message to which I have just made reference: 

"One consciousness alone there is and the sincere soul 

utilizes the universe for a brain." 

11 



12 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Consciousness is personality touching the universe at 
divine points of contact. There can be no such thing 
as death as understood by the people of the earth, 
because there can be no complete cessation of con- 
sciousness for an indefinite period. There is never 
such a thing as total cessation of consciousness. 
There is a reduced form of consciousness that fluctu- 
ates with the rise and fall of the condition of the 
bodies that you inhabit. 

Another of the great objects of the book is to 
emphasize what the Hebrews were inspired to know, 
and all the great saviours have taught, namely, the 
idea of one God and only one. That truth is the 
universal axis upon which all the planes revolve. 
The Master said: "I and the Father are one." He 
has said: "Ye are gods." He has referred to you 
as His brother, to God the divine as His Father. So 
you who read this book know that there is only one 
God, and you are an immortal, ever-living, always 
higher evolving phase of the one divine Intelligence. 

Physical death means that a physical apparatus 
called the body is dispensed with so that, as you as- 
cend to the place prepared for you by yourself, you 
find that your consciousness is touching the universe 
at higher points of divine contact. This being so, 
those who have preceded you through the experience 
of body-change are in a position to know more of life 
than those awaiting the death incident. But the 
greatest fact that you will absorb from these pages 
in connection with the death incident is that the con- 
sciousness which was your loved one is an extended 
part of your own consciousness, and it requires only 



PREFACE 13 

faith j purity,, and love on your part in order that the 
message of your soul shall reach to all who ever knew 
you. 

This book is a drama. It opens with a prologue, 
— a reference by Leon Tolstoi to a differentiation 
between a crude half -barbarian civilization now sub- 
siding and the age now coming with a pure, simple, 
inspired religion and an economic system which is 
nearly ethical and is at the least an equity. After the 
prologue comes the chapter on Facts in Evidence, 
which will help our less developed sisters and 
brothers, whom we will describe as five-sense in- 
dividuals. Then in a general way, the various scenes 
and acts which make up the drama open and close 
with the life-experience and teaching, the joys and 
tears of men and women who have had the same earth 
process of education as yourself. They will speak to 
you in their own way, but always in a way that is 
intelligible. 

The book is a drama because it contains in its chap- 
ters a review of fifth and higher plane world history, 
the outstanding events of epoch-making nature, al- 
ways through the personality of individuals. So the 
great philosophers of the ages speak to you. The 
women of history love their thoughts to you. Some 
of the scientists speak of the facts of organized knowl- 
edge. The poets condense a lifetime of wisdom in an 
epigram. As you watch the curtain raised and 
lowered between the acts of each chapter, and think 
of what you have heard, you will know that the re- 
porter of this work was directed by us to weave into 
the fabric of this book those things only which his 



14 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

best knowledge told him to fit in with this measure: 
They must, first of all, be the teaching of solace. 
They must be illuminating. They must be literary. 
In knowing that the communications we have sent 
through comply definitely with this standard, we are 
not egotistical, for we give to you a firm disavowal of 
the messages being the offspring of our own author- 
ship, except for a fractional impress. For this book 
is a revelation. It is a continuation of that revela- 
tion that has never ceased because the Divine wills to 
reveal Himself to His children and unveil forever 
the nobler aspects of His face. 

Individuals such as we are instruments — channels 
through which a revelation of this kind courses and 
flows. Such a person every individual is, for Jesus 
said, "Ye are gods," which was a recognition on His 
part that the Divine energy which is intelligence 
emanates from Jehovah, finds lodgement in an in- 
dividual, becoming a man or a woman in order that 
the Divine may recognize himself as a Father know- 
ing His own children. 

This book has a message, first, for you; a larger 
message for the nation, and a greater one still for the 
world plane. These messages are the precursors of 
material out of which a new religion, a great age, and 
a divine civilization will emerge. So, reader, if yours 
is a sacred attitude towards the message in this book, 
read on. If not, close the book. Life will in you go 
on and some day bring you to the conclusion that this 
is exactly the food you need. 

In any event, dear brother or sister, read some 
large portion of this work, for you then, at least, give 



PREFACE 15 

our thought an invitation to meet your own in con- 
sideration of the purpose and direction of life. None 
know the hour or the day of the effect of another's 
written thought. So, perhaps God in His love is 
bending down through the chapters of this book to 
kiss you on the lips of your most serious need. Be 
assured that many, in reading this book, will feel at 
least the kiss of those they thought long gone into a 
dark and invisible mystery. So, Reader, your loved 
ones yearn for you to follow this revelation to the end, 
that they, meeting you, may feel your reunion with 
reality. 

Sisters and brothers: This book has as its only 
reward the knowledge that a reading of it will give 
you thought-food, and will occasionally lift you above 
terrestrial gravitation into the world where love, art 
and beauty twine around the eternal consciousness of 
the ascended finite mind. 

— The United Soul of the Heaven Planes. 



"A revelation is always a compilation of life principles 
from a group of souls." 

"No soul can communicate with another except through 
the universe." 



PROLOGUE 

Men and ^Women: 

The age in which you live trusts you with a re- 
sponsibility greater than any previous epoch has 
known. You must advance thought along the line of 
faith, nor turn back, nor to either side. The re- 
sponsibility of which you are trustees is the contribu- 
tion of all the suffering through unrecorded and re- 
corded centuries. You live in a period that I term 
the divine generational moment. What you do, what 
you believe, what you love, what you fear, will, more 
than in any time that has ever been, control the 
destinies of the unborn as well as of the born. 

Great truth is never a threat. Sometimes it is a 
warning, and the solemn warnings that have rung out 
from the lips of the inspired ere this have never been 
heeded. So nations died; empires loosened to chaotic 
crumbling, until your remaining civilization is hardly 
more than a wreck of the past. The heaven planes 
have opened their doors and are speaking a revela- 
tion of the plainest and simplest truth, without guile 
and in no disguise. 

The message of the heaven worlds to the earth 
plane as contained in this book is this : The only real 
object in life is to supplement intellect with heart, and 
the sophistry of material education with inspiration. 
There are those who look for the end of the earth 

plane world. Worlds never end. Civilizations, 

17 



18 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

though, cease to be. And so, solemnly, lovingly and 
prophetically, we say through the pages of this 
book, of the skeptic who always has an alternative, 
arbitrarily-dogmatic explanation of substantial and 
sacred fact, — let him beware. This book is intended 
as mother-love for the gentle, but as adamantine 
Gibraltar-stone for the materialist, the doubter, the 
scorner, the superficial scholastic, who will beat his 
feeble wings against the rock of truth in vain. 

The earth plane will always have the glory of the 
diversity of nationalities, but the time is nigh when 
the Slav, the Oriental, the Occidental, and all the 
races, at the conference of peacefully leagued nations, 
will decide that Jesus, His teachings and His moun- 
tainous sermon, are the eternal forces that will com- 
mission the great generational epoch of your time to 
amalgamate all discordant elements, not into a mosaic 
of perfection, but into a splendid Olympic arena of 
manhood and womanhood where achievement is never 
at the expense of another, but for another that all 
may progress. 

Leon Tolstoi. 



THE STATEMENT OF SAMUEL TAYLOR 

COLERIDGE 

Explaining His Position as Master of the 
Mother Group 

Many years ago I recovered, and in part, dis- 
covered, a consciousness which made me a citizen of 
the Twentieth Plane. That is to say that after the 
experience of physical death, I arrived in the heaven 
world, where each one of the human race must come 
when he changes the place of his soul's residence. 
Finding myself in this new world, I entered a mental, 
spiritual and astral solitude in which to contemplate 
that which I was, after having graduated from the 
school of earth. 

I compared what I had accomplished with my op- 
portunities, and I felt the sorrow of regret at having 
failed to measure accomplishment with knowledge. 
But this was only momentary. I soon learned from 
the teachers of this plane that a misspent hour of life 
on the earth plane can be atoned for here if one has 
a high resolve and a large work of an ethical nature 
to do. 

I was informed by the spirit of the sages, whose 
wisdom is the consciousness of this plane, that there 
was a work made ready for me to do as the master of 
a group of souls who would prepare important data, 
organize heavenly knowledge, and formulate the 

19 



20 BIXtTH THROUGH DEATH 

teaching of a revelation to be sent from the Mother 
Group and assisting groups of the souls of the 
Twentieth Plane, somewhat through the direction of 
a captain, a guide, a master, living only in the ideal 
of such a service. 

So I became such a guide, and on more occasions 
than any other voice through whose tones and words 
the contributions of the Revelation have been spoken, 
the touch of myself has come to you. Not that I 
hold any superior position by reason of the frequency 
of my presence, but I filled this position because 
God told me this to do. 

My brother, dear Reader, when you read many 
answers I have given to questions, chapters I have 
dictated, some epigrams and aphorisms, know that 
the frequent mention of my name is not egotism, but 
I stand here in this prominent position in the Revela- 
tion because knowledge breathes itself through each 
soul for a great purpose, and only occasionally turns 
around to enquire the name of the individual through 
whose soul such knowledge has spoken. This is the 
law by which the Revelation is given: not through 
individuals or names alone, but assisted by individuals 
and names because all revelation intended for man 
flows through the soul. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
March 7, 1920. 



The soul in after life remembers only soul impressions. 

— Coleridge 



THE MEMORY OF ONE WHO DWELLS 
IN THE HEAVEN WOULD 

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

My memory as it applies to the purposes of this 
higher plane is of an extremely different nature from 
the memory you use, dear reader, in your world. 
Memory to us here is simply a connection between 
efforts put forth towards development so that the 
recollection acts as a lever lifting us to achievement. 
Memory on the earth plane is a different power in 
that it enables you to profit by experience whether 
trivial or important. It teaches you the means by 
which to adjust yourselves to ever-changing circum- 
stances, and preserves from stagnation by keeping 
consciousness employed in a review of all the events 
of daily life. This will reveal clearly that the pas- 
sage from physical to astral life alters memory fun- 
damentally as an adjunct to consciousness, and, more 
basically still, gives a different valuation to the re- 
tained memory-record of the experience of physical 
life. 

Each philosopher who becomes known as one whose 
work was a contribution to human endeavour stands 
sponsor for at least one great truth. We are only 
sponsors for truth; we never create it. Hamilton is 
an example of this. His thought that memory de- 
pends upon the association of ideas is one page in the 

23 



24 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

book of all fact, therefore for the physical mind to 
understand our memory, it must use as its method 
the law of association of ideas. Let me illustrate. 
As a baby, you learned that your mother was a 
woman, and ever afterwards every woman spoke 
some little thing to you about your mother. Now 
transport yourself through your imagination to the 
astral world, and every woman here will still remind 
you of your mother. Likewise of a wife, a husband, 
a loved one, or of any deep earth plane experience. 
I will state for your better understanding, this 
epigram: The soul, in after life, remembers only 
soul impressions. See the force of my teaching, dear 
reader. It is this : As the astral world, in the very 
nature of its constitution, through the law of the as- 
sociation of ideas, can remind you only of funda- 
mental impressions, and your soul, which is a citizen 
of this world, retains only soul-impressions, then the 
trivial events of time and place and things pertaining 
to your sojourn on the physical plane evanish like 
wave-scud that an advancing tide dissolves into the 
far-stretching waters. 

When next you speak to the soul of one you love, 
my brother, the sense of whose loss is your grief, 
meet the remembered impressions of his soul with the 
consciousness of your mind, and do not present to him 
the voice of your physical memory, for if you do, you 
will speak to him in a foreign language. Then the 
loved one will be aggrieved at your disappointment. 
This is the law of the greatest memory of all — the 
knowledge of our God. 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 

The Reporter 

We should never complain because another asks us 
to be exact. The following chapter is designed to 
meet the intellectual demand for evidence based on 
physical, mental and psychic facts. 

In grouping together a series of incidents such as 
these, the reporter's idea has been to meet the de- 
mand, not so much of the psychical research worker 
as that of the intellectual psychologist, so as to sup- 
ply him with evidences the study of which will lead 
him at least to a sympathetic acquaintance with this 
Revelation. 

Francis Grierson, the distinguished prophet of 
mysticism, wrote the reporter from New York on 
May 1, 1919, saying: 

"I perceive that a new order of unfoldment is 
awaiting you." 

A few days later he wrote again stating that July 
and August would be months remarkable in the his- 
tory of the reporter for such development as he had 
already predicted. 

The dates of the following incidents will show how 
accurately and exactly these predictions were ful- 
filled. The first remarkable experience occurred on 
the morning of July fourteenth at six o'clock. The 
reporter was sitting in a dark room, closed his eyes 

25 



26 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

for meditation, and when he opened them again, the 
room was flooded with a golden light. This re- 
mained for some moments and was succeeded for 
hours by a realization that he was living a soul life 
quite independently of the functions of body and 
brain. There was exaltation, but no disturbance of 
function. His daily work as a physician was per- 
formed as usual. He made visits to his patients as 
on other days, but all the while realized that his most 
significant life was not of the physical body, not of 
intellectual processes, not that manifested by the 
activities any onlooker might observe, not one of ela- 
tion or self-interest, but rather that of a solemn joy 
in the contemplation of a perfect world of which he 
seemed to be almost a universal ingredient. All the 
least duties of the day took on a sublime importance 
because they were a part, even though a small one, of 
that perfect order that would have been marred by 
their omission or neglect. 

The Message Star 

On the twenty-fourth of June in the year nineteen 
nineteen, a dialogue took place in the library at num- 
ber ten Euclid Avenue, Toronto. Mr. Louis Ben- 
jamin was with me and was in trance, appearing also 
to be unconscious at the time. The communicating 
intelligence claimed to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
His words are given here in quotation marks, mine 
are without them. This, substantially, was the dia- 
logue: 

"Take your telescope at nine-thirty P. M. on the fifteenth 
of July and turn it on Venus." 



FACTS IJNT EVIDENCE 27 

But Venus will not be visible that evening, will she? 

"You are an astronomer, but you are mistaken this time." 

I thought Venus was now nearing her inferior conjunction. 

"No, she has not yet reached her greatest eastern elonga- 
tion." 

You are positive, and no doubt you are right; I was not 
sure. What then? 

"Get Venus in the centre of the field and keep her there. 
A star will float into the field and move slowly about in the 
space near the planet. It will be our signal to you from 
the Twentieth Plane." 

Will it be a real star? 

"No, but to you it will have the appearance of a star." 

Will any other see it? There are sure to be many astron- 
omers observing Venus whenever she is open to observation. 

"None of them will see it unless they look through your 
telescope." 

The conversation now turned to other themes. 
Meanwhile, thought was raising astronomical ques- 
tions: Why would astronomers not see the star? 
Why not the sensitive photographic plate? If this 
was not to be a star, then what was it to be? I hesi- 
tated to ask as the voice seemed prone to change the 
subject. 

On July fifteenth at nine thirty P. M., I was en- 
gaged at other absorbing work and did not get a look 
at Venus till nine forty-five. When I had Venus 
in focus, a hazy object was noticed at the south-west 
of the field, and this, when the telescope had been 
lengthened sufficiently, appeared as a first magnitude 
star. The definition was very clear. The night was 
cloudless in the west. There remained a few minutes 
before the planet would disappear below the house 



28 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

roofs. I examined the lenses of the telescope, remov- 
ing and cleaning them to be sure of no foreign sub- 
stance. Replaced in their tubes, they gave the same 
aspect and appearance of the mysterious star, ex- 
cept that the strange point of light had moved and 
was moving on to other parts of the field. This 
movement was quite irregular. The story of its ap- 
pearance, coupled with its actual movements, sug- 
gested to me the adjective "deliberate" as applied 
to its irregular motions. They were not astronom- 
ical motions. It seemed as though someone were 
moving it to whatever part of the field he chose. It 
was wilful and capricious in direction. 

Nothing in the instrument could account for the 
strange object or its motions. I resolved to discover 
whether anything in nature's own telescope, the eye, 
was the cause of the apparition. I called four adult 
members of my own family. These all looked and 
saw it in succession. Five persons of intelligence had 
clearly seen it moving about the telescopic field in 
the neighborhood of the planet. One of those who 
saw it was not a member of the Inner Circle of the 
Twentieth Plane. 

By this time Venus was disappearing behind the 
obstructing roofs and the observation ended. The 
leaders of astronomical science of Toronto were, 
most of them, out of the city. I was away the next 
evening, but on the second I looked again at Venus, 
using the same telescope, and found nothing of the 
star. It had disappeared. 

On the nineteenth of July, speaking with one who 
claimed to be the same personality, in the same room 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 29 

and under the same conditions, I asked further about 
the experience. The following is my record of the 
conversation: 

"You saw the star?" 

Yes. But what actually was it you did, and what was it 
we saw? 

"We focused great quantities of light on a certain point, 
that point being in your line of vision with Venus." 

Why was the focal adjustment so different from that re- 
quired to define Venus? 

"Would you expect an object five hundred miles away to 
be in the same focal adjustment as that of an object, say, 
thirty-five or forty millions of miles away?" 

Certainly not. 

Since the distance of Venus was about eighty thou- 
sand times as great as that of the "star," and the 
nearest observatory was two miles away, the math- 
ematical mind will readily comprehend that one look- 
ing at Venus from our own observatory would side- 
track the star by nearly two miles, since that would 
still be approximately the distance between our lines 
of vision five hundred miles from the earth. The 
photographic plate would miss the "star" because of 
its constant motion which would prevent any image 
being shown on the plate at the distance of the Twen- 
tieth Plane (500 miles). 

I asked on one occasion if any useful object would 
be served by a repetition of the experience so that 
several scientists might observe it. The answer was 
a negative. The object of the signal was not to con- 
vert skeptics, but to help those who had faith, as 
shown by their acceptance of reasonable evidence. 



30 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Skeptics would doubtless explain it away or deny its 
possibility even though it were attested with indu- 
bitable proof. 

The "star" appeared, on July fifteenth, nineteen 
nineteen, because the members of the Mother-group 
on the Twentieth Plane felt it necessary that the 
Inner Circle on earth should know that they had 
been signalled out of the heavens. The story is given 
here because of its profound effect upon persons to 
whom the wonder was described. To it the Inner 
Circle owes the advent of one of its most helpful 
members. The reporter was loath to publish so in- 
timate a matter, for he regards the incident as in- 
tended chiefly for the encouragement of the Inner 
Circle; but realizing the effect of the relation on the 
lives of others, he put aside all hesitancy, assured that 
the full account of the experience should be given 
to the public. 

Vocal Silence 

On the twenty-seventh day of July, in the year 
nineteen nineteen, the Instrument and I went to the 
country together and, leaving our car on a side line, 
walked half a mile from the road to a hill covered 
with pines. It was late in the evening of a moon- 
less night. Clouds covered most of the sky, but oc- 
casionally clear patches were seen among them. A 
strong wind was blowing. At Toronto the highest 
rate of the wind that day was twenty-three miles 
per hour. At Buffalo, the highest rate for the day 
was thirty miles. This rate had abated considerably 
by the evening, but still a fresh and noisy wind was 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 31 

blowing, for the pine trees were singing loudly and 
the breeze roared in our ears as it loves to do on a 
windy night. 

We sat on a hill. After the usual prayer Louis 
Benjamin went into an unconscious trance. Dur- 
ing the conversation which followed several intelli- 
gences spoke to me, as it appeared, and at nearly ten 
o'clock Coleridge said: 

"If you will lie on the ground and place the Instrument's 
hands on your forehead, we will endeavour to cause you to 
hear the music of the spheres." 

I followed his instructions, and he proceeded: 
"Now we will cause the winds to subside and you will hear 
the music of the planets.'* 

Within five or six seconds the wind, which had 
been incessantly singing in the trees, ceased to blow, 
and absolute silence ensued. Not a train was heard 
anywhere, nor a falling leaf, nor a bird, nor any per- 
ceptible whisper or lisping or noise of any kind. It 
seemed that one might have cut the silence into slices 
so palpable and real was it. It was altogether a new 
and strange experience, for I had never before ob- 
served a silence so solemn and imperial. Then Cole- 
ridge spoke: 

"Now that the winds are still, if you will listen to the 
right, you will hear a very faint, but, when you have heard 
it, a distinct hum as if it were raining miles away and, by 
some supernatural acuteness of hearing, you detected the 
sound." 

I listened to the right and heard such a sound as Coleridge 
had indicated. Then on the left, and it was there as clear 
as on the right. I said : 



32 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

I hear it on both sides. He replied : 

"Yes, of course, it is all around jou. I asked you to listen 
on the right so as to focus and intensify your sense of hear- 
ing. Now if you are sure you have heard it, we will re- 
lease the wind and proceed with other matters." 

I have certainly heard what you described. 

Within five seconds the wind was blowing as 
freshly and noisily as before. The whole experience 
as it affected the atmosphere was over in about sixty- 
seconds or a little more, perhaps, but it was alto- 
gether too astonishing to be a natural subsidence of 
the wind. I grew up in the country. I have helped 
to rebuild rail fences that had been strewn by the 
storm across the whole width of a ten-acre field. I 
know how the wind sometimes grows still and for a 
few moments is silent, then resumes its fury. This 
was no such event. In such a case one can still hear 
the leaves flutter and rustle in the slighter breeze, but 
on that mysterious night there was no sound; the 
world seemed to be listening in vain for the least 
whisper of the elements, while the silence thundered 
with the presence of God, for the whole night was 
sacred with joy and worship and throbbing with 
the rhythm of eternity. 

In descriptions such as this, one must pass over the 
boundaries of the physical and use a mystical lan- 
guage, else words do not convey the least hint of the 
reality of the experience. 

The trance over, we rose to our feet. The Instru- 
ment as usual was eager to hear something of what 
had transpired during the trance, having been quite 
oblivious to it all. We were standing to rest a few 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 33 

moments till he came fully to his normal state. We 
were compelled to lock arms for mutual support 
against the boisterous onrush of the wind. He asked 
me about the hour we had spent together. I told 
him of the subsidence of the wind and the music of 
the spheres. When I came to the words of Cole- 
ridge, "Now we will cause the winds to subside and 
you will hear the music of the planets," while I pro- 
nounced them, the wind subsided again as suddenly 
as before, and we both heard that solemn cosmic 
hum. The stillness was dramatic — almost appalling. 
Again it lasted for perhaps a minute, then the winds 
rushed on. 

We walked down the hill in the darkness. It was 
ten-thirty P. M. As we crossed the little stream of 
the Etobicoke, I had occasion again to speak of the 
matter and to use the words once more. As the sen- 
tence fell again on the noisy air, the winds, as before, 
this being the third time, fell to nothingness of sound, 
and the far faint music of the worlds beat softly on 
the quiet shores of perception. I found the Instru- 
ment far keener in his senses than I. This increased 
sensitiveness, I believe, is usually characteristic of 
mediums and psychics. 

The Incident of the Names 

On August seventh, nineteen nineteen, Oscar L. 
Wilson, of Homer, Illinois, wrote me from that city. 
He said that while residing in Danville, 111., he had 
received communications from some of our friends on 
the Twentieth Plane, through the psychic powers of 
his wife. He had twenty-six volumes, containing 



34 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

these and other communications. He gave one from 
Edgar Allan Poe, who, he suggested, might give me 
the names of others who had spoken, with himself, 
to my correspondent. This, he thought, coming 
through Louis Benjamin independently, would have 
evidential value. Poe must know the names of some 
of these. Oscar Wilson, therefore, withheld the 
names till he should hear from me. 

As a rule, we do not enter into this kind of work. 
It is not a part of our present task. It is the proper 
work of a Society for Psychical Research, but is not 
the proper function of those who are reporting a 
revelation. When faith and spirituality are as evi- 
dent as they were in Oscar Wilson's letter, we some- 
times allude to such matters. This was done in the 
case now in question, and Edgar Allan Poe gave me 
the following list containing the names of some of 
those who, he was absolutely sure, had spoken to my 
correspondent in Illinois: 

William Cullen Bryant 

General Custer 

Henry D. Thoreau 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

William Ellery Channing 

Abraham Lincoln 

A man named Tobias 

Rembrandt 

Francis Thompson 

A man who had been a psychic medium named 

Blood 
George F. Watts 
John Ruskin 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 35 

On receiving the list, Oscar Wilson wrote, stat- 
ing that he at once recognized and remembered all 
on the list as having communicated with him save 
only three. Examining his records, he found a com- 
munication from one of these three. Then he found 
many messages from one who always gave the name 
"Tobe" which was evidently a familiar name for 
Tobias. He thought also that the name Blood might 
have been Flood as he had received communications 
from a psychic medium of that name. These being 
the three whose names he at first failed to recognize 
as having spoken to him, he wrote me in conclusion, 
"I am satisfied myself that all in the list you sent 
me have spoken to me at some time or other during 
the years past." 

This list of names could not have been a successful 
guess. They could hardly have been transferred 
from the mind of Oscar Wilson to that of our In- 
strument. Three of the names in it were foreign to 
Oscar Wilson's recent thought. To illustrate this, 
I quote further from his letter: "I always enjoyed 
Emerson's writings and often wondered why he did 
not speak. I thought he never had, but looking hur- 
riedly through the records, I found one from him." 
This was after he received Edgar Allan Poe's list. 
I have reason from subsequent communications to 
feel assured that if the transfer had been from Oscar 
Wilson's mind to that of Louis Benjamin, it would 
have been a very different group and would have 
included other names far more deeply interesting to 
my correspondent than some of those in the list. 
Professor William James of Harvard, for instance, 



36 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

and many others prominent in science, art, and reli- 
gion, of various nations. 

I have permission to publish this incident couched 
in words that show the deep sincerity and faith of 
my correspondent: 

"Publish it? Certainly, publish it! Anything to 
help our Father's business. When my affairs inter- 
fere with my Father's, I'll change mine." 

The Acid Test 

On March fifteenth, nineteen twenty, Professor 
William James dictated to me through the psychic 
consciousness of our Instrument the conclusion of the 
chapter on "The Vision of Life Through Psychic 
Eyes." When this work was completed, we had a 
delightful personal conversation, during the course 
of which I remarked: 

Oscar Wilson, of Homer, Illinois, tells me he often hears 
from you. 

"Yes," he replied, "he is a unique character. By the way, 
will you send him this message: Tell him that the accident 
which took place the other day in the back of the drug store 
was purely chemical in its origin. The clerk was in no sense 
to blame for it." 

I sent the message in due course, and this morn- 
ing, April third, nineteen twenty, received Mr. Wil- 
son's reply, from which I quote as follows: 

"What are all the disbelievers going to do with 
this evidential matter as to the accident ? I had never 
said anything to you or anyone else about it, in fact 
had dismissed it completely from my mind. But 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 37 

Professor James knew just how to phrase it so that 
I could unmistakably recall it. I did recall it, but 
you, at this moment, do not know what that accident 
was. William James knew all about it and knew 
my mind at the time as well. Now I will tell you 
about the accident, just what it was, etc. 

"I think it was some two or three months ago that 
the dispensing clerk was liquefying three or four 
pound bottles of crystalline carbolic acid in a water 
bath. When ready to lift out and add the water 
necessary to hold the acid in solution, the last bottle 
'popped' (all corks were out), the acid spilt over his 
hands as it all fell to the floor. I recall now having 
had in my mind at the time the thought of some 
possible carelessness on his part." 

It is easy to ask questions which sidetrack evi- 
dence. Some evidence appeals to one person, other 
evidence to another. I simply give a few cases out 
of a multitude. Some of them appeal more to me 
than do others. I simply state the facts. The reader 
may explain them as he will. 

Psychic Criticism 

If one would apply the severest intellectual test in 
the literarv field, one could not do better than to re- 
quire a rapid and effective revision of ordinary prose. 
I have seen much of this work done by capable lit- 
terateurs, but never had I seen such able and decisive 
work as that which Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave 
me the privilege to observe. 

I am familiar with the theories of hypnotism, of 
the objective and the subjective minds, of nature- 



38 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

memory, and all the theories, I believe, that have 
been enunciated to explain psychic phenomena. I 
know how alert the psychic mind can be under the 
power of suggestion. I know that "the subjective 
mind" is supposed to have a perfect memory; all that 
has been advanced in the various schools of thought, 
including the cults of religious thought, has been con- 
sidered, but if the genuineness of the test I am about 
to speak of is not to be admitted, then I am wholly 
at sea. The matter is otherwise not yet explained. 

On one occasion Louis Benjamin had been in 
trance four hours on the previous evening, and our 
revision was interrupted by a meeting which lasted 
another four hours. We were revising the chapter 
titled "The Vision of Life Through Psychic Eyes." 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked me after we had 
read and revised three pages if I thought he was too 
severe in his work. I replied that, in my opinion, 
literary revision could not be too thorough. I spoke 
of the remarkable keenness of his observation. Then 
he directed me to go to the library, take any book, 
and choose a passage at random. I did so, taking a 
volume of The Universal Anthology , and read sen- 
tences covering two or three paragraphs. As I fin- 
ished reading each sentence, he repeated it after me 
without hesitation, improving the literary construc- 
tion strikingly in every case. My judgment was 
compelled to approve his emendation. So rapid, so 
unerring, so decisive and final was the work, I have 
never known it equalled by another. 

On a later occasion, Coleridge proffered similar 
evidence for the benefit of a young graduate of To- 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 39 

ronto University who was present and whom it im- 
pressed. The book, in this case, Arnold's Essays, 
Literary and Critical, was chosen by my secretary, 
Lawrence Huston, without direction from either Cole- 
ridge or myself. Coleridge made it clear that Arnold 
had used many words redundantly and others care- 
lessly as to their exact shade of meaning. 

This experience naturally could not have the same 
evidential value to the reader as to those who were 
present, even if the criticism of .Coleridge were pre- 
sented word for word. To the reporter, the fact that 
an unseen intelligence was able, instantaneously and 
without preparation, to improve the sentence struc- 
ture and use of word- values of a master of English 
so eminent, was evidence of the presence of another 
master of English. 

Astral Prevision 

On the evening of May seventeenth, nineteen nine- 
teen, our Inner Circle received warning from the 
Twentieth Plane through my Mother (Louis Benja- 
min, the instrument, being in trance at the time), 
to the effect that a great sorrow was about to fall 
on us in a few days. They could not give us details, 
for they themselves, they declared, did not know them. 
All present, however, would be preserved harmless. 

We made no further enquiries, this being our rule, 
since, had there been wisdom in or necessity for fur- 
ther revealing, it would have been given as far as it 
was in their possession. 

Early in the spring the reporter of this Revelation 
had been invited by his friend J. M. F. to spend 



40 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

May twenty-fourth at his cottage on the Severn 
River. He accepted the invitation, promising to go 
if nothing prevented. A short time later he was 
asked to speak in Toronto on the last Sunday in 
May, which he promised to do, not knowing that 
Empire Day (May twenty-fourth) fell on Saturday. 
On May eighteenth when asked to be ready to go 
north on the twenty-third, he realized that his engage- 
ment to speak on the twenty-fifth would prevent his 
going; J. M. F. invited another dear friend, George 
A. Hill, to be his guest on the Severn, and the re- 
porter of this Revelation remained in Toronto. 

The day passed, but on Monday, May twenty- 
sixth, information came by telephone that both these 
friends had been carried in their canoe over a steep 
fall in the Severn, and that both were dead. A few 
hours later, it was ascertained, that almost miracu- 
lously, as it seemed, J. M. F. had been able, after 
being in the water for three-quarters of an hour, to 
reach the river bank. He lay in wet clothes under 
his canoe all night and reached his home next morning. 

Speaking a few days later to my mother (of the 
Twentieth Plane) she told us she had sensed dimly, 
though she could not know the facts, danger to 
her son in connection with his proposed trip to the 
Severn, and had used her best endeavor to prevent 
his going on the trip. My friend who lost his phys- 
ical life that day has spoken with me since on sev- 
eral occasions. His style of address is unmistakable. 
Those who knew him, and he had many dear friends, 
will remember well his manner of speaking in alter- 
nate leaps and pauses, each sudden phrase, distinctly 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 41 

his own manner, sometimes almost brilliant, and fol- 
lowed by a short pause. This was decidedly his 
method when speaking to me. His subject matter 
too was characteristic. 

One other peculiarity is that he still calls me "Doc- 
tor," as he always did before his passing. The only 
other two who do not commonly call the reporter 
A. D. are my mother, and the Master. None of 
these three had ever on a single occasion used the 
common title. 

The reporter does not understand the principles 
which explain foreknowledge except as they are set 
forth in the chapter "The Vision of Life Through 
Psychic Eyes." On various occasions we have been 
told that we would shortly receive distinguished vis- 
itors, some of these were to come from England, some 
from the United States, and they came in every case 
within a comparatively short space of time. Some- 
times the names were given, and in one case, that of a 
Spanish gentleman named Da Castro, we received 
only the name Castro. In another instance, the in- 
itials only were given — W. S. The place of residence 
was named. A gentleman arrived from Washington 
as predicted. The initials were correct. None of us 
had ever heard of these persons before. This was 
true of several others, one being a distinguished mu- 
sical composer from the United States, and so de- 
scribed in the prediction. 

One remarkable instance of prevision was that in 
which three soldier boys, in all of whom we were 
very much interested, were discussed by my mother. 
She declared that two of them would return without 



42 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

wounds, but the third (Lieutenant Heakes, R. A. F.) 1 
would receive a slight wound in the left leg from 
which he would recover. The prediction was made 
some time before the lieutenant was shot in the left 
ankle while in the air. The other boys came home 
unscathed. 

Recently the probable advent of a well-known 
English psychic who would call on the reporter was 
announced. The prediction was fulfilled. The gen- 
tleman spoke in our city before a scientific audience, 
and his call on the reporter will be remembered with 
delight. 

jistral Recollection 

One incident was alluded to in the Twentieth Plane 
which I may relate more fully now. A personal 
friend (W. R. S.) spoke to me through our instru- 
ment. He said: 

"This is Restelle." 

I asked: "Do you mean Will?" 

"Yes," came the reply. "I want to thank you for 
a great help you gave when alone in my room with 
me about an hour before I passed over. You said, 
'Will, you've lived a hero-life. Re brave now.' I 
shall never be able to tell you how much those words 
helped me at that time. I was unable to answer 
you then, so I am sending the message to you now." 

This message came to the reporter seven years 
after the incident related therein. Naturally, that 
incident had not been spoken of by him to any one. 
He had not thought of it for five years. No one else 
living on the earth plane knew of it. Only one other 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 43 

than the reporter knew of it, and that was Kestelle. 
The statement made by him was accurate in every 
particular. 

An unseen friend spoke to one of us about a "sil- 
ver watch" he used on earth. None of us had ever 
seen him with a silver watch as far as we could re- 
member; so a particular friend of the communicant 
was asked if he remembered the watch. He did. 
Some significant circumstance had impressed the 
memory of the watch on the mind of his departed 
friend. "The soul remembers only soul impressions." 

The reporter had received the chapter titled "The 
Monoatom" on March twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty. 
That night he dreamed, without having thought of the 
matter previously, of the desirability of having a par- 
agraph from Galileo to introduce this chapter of sci- 
ence. Immediately in his dream, Galileo said : 

"This is Galileo. I will give you a paragraph now. Take 
it down : 

"The Universe is an enormous press, capable both of com- 
pression and release. Universal power concentrates energy 
into each unformed particle, with all the force of all the 
worlds. This monoatom then forever thrills with release of 
life which flows unceasingly from this centre of all energy." 

The dream ended here, as far as I recollect. In 
the morning I remembered all the dream save only 
the paragraph, of which I could not recall one word. 
At the week-end I had opportunity to speak to Cole- 
ridge. I told him my dream and explained all about 
my inability to recall Galileo's paragraph. He asked: 



44 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

"Do you think you would recognize it if Galileo were to 
give it to you again?" 

"Yes ; I believe I might," I replied. 

"Then take it down now: 'The Universe is an enormous 
press, etc' " 

"That is it," I said, and the paragraph proceeded and 
was recognized in every phrase and clause. 

These instances are chosen from among many for 
presentation because they are, besides being eviden- 
tial, concerned in most cases with present-day, local 
personalities; one of the questions arising as to the 
revelation, in minds who have not appreciated the real 
nature of the present volume, being: "Why do not 
some of your own friends, people who are not high- 
brows, speak to you?" The answer is: they do, but 
in the nature of the revelation, it is necessary that 
minds whose knowledge is highly organized and well- 
ordered should communicate. 

A whole volume could be written containing noth- 
ing but evidence such as is contained here. These in- 
stances are selected from the many as being typical 
of all the different forms of evidence. The facts are 
not related as being, in every case, a proof of au- 
thenticity, but they are such facts as should be con- 
sidered in the examination of evidence. These evi- 
dential facts, culled from many other similar psychic 
experiences that we have had during the last two 
years, are presented here for the purpose of placing 
on record psychic experiences which nearly every 
reader can duplicate with a similar or more striking 
experience of his own. Such incidents by the very 
weight of their frequency and commonness in most 



FACTS IN EVIDENCE 45 

cases must bring an overwhelming conviction of the 
truth taught in this Revelation to the effect that we 
are physical beings living in a psychical world. 

Facts in Evidence is a useful chapter by which to 
rise from an intellectual basis to the rarer beauty 
of the other chapters which constitute the greatness 
of this Revelation. We have duplicated, in the last 
two years, almost every phase of physical, mental 
and spiritual psychic experience such as is recorded 
in the best works on the subject. 



The eight common-sense principles directly control the 
door of entrance through sleep into a consciousness ethereally 
beautiful, rejuvenatingly powerful and soulfully upward in- 
clining. 



SLEEP: ITS POWER AND USES 

Sleep is a change from active consciousness to la- 
tent experience. It is, first of all, rest to the phys- 
ical body, which is, as its most definite characteristic 
implies, the reducing of breathing and thinking, these 
being connected and interrelated with a pulsation of 
respiration and thought which is not governed by will, 
suggestion or desire, as regulated by the finite mind. 

The finite human mind is an apparatus capable of 
adjustment by the soul to four strata of ordinary 
earth plane routine consciousness. The four are: 
1, Environment; 2, Habit; 3, Love; 4, Idealism. 
The finite mind can adjust itself only in order to have 
a four-component part system of functioning in a 
physical world. The limitations of the finite mind 
would preclude immortality and rule out a higher 
order of intelligence were it not that the finite mind is 
only a phase of consciousness and not a complete con- 
sciousness in itself. In the early evolutionary devel- 
opment of the finite mind, there was but one form 
of adaptability to universal consciousness, and that 
was surface-contact with environment. But even the 
finite mind is of aeonian age, and surface-contact 
came to higher adaptations in the other three step- 
ping-into chambers of w T ider illumination. Sleep, 
therefore, is a nexus that spans the space between 
the four finite points of consciousness and the next 
higher, the fifth, through the passivity and non-self - 

47 



48 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

determination of the individual which couples the 
four finitely-conscious points with the fifth which is 
the land of eternal consciousness. 

The finite consciousness, having now journeyed 
through physical sleep into the land of eternal con- 
sciousness, is only on the boundary line of that plane 
where the limitations of earth have receded into the 
past. In fact, the great distinction between the 
world of the finite consciousness and that of the eter- 
nal consciousness is that the finite consciousness is 
always a world of things past. The plane of eternal 
consciousness is the world of things present. This 
will be grasped by the philosophical mind when it is 
stated that the world of the past, the finite, is a 
world of the conclusion of lesser things; the world 
of the present, the eternal consciousness, is a world 
of the beginning of things which the mystic Swe- 
denborg described as the world of causality, as con- 
tradistinguished from the world of effects, which is' 
the world of the finite mind. 

The earth plane, physically awakened and using 
the finite consciousness through a physical brain, uses 
about one-fourth of the eternal consciousness. Sleep 
ushers you into the empire of complete consciousness, 
the use of the other three-quarters of consciousness, 
enabling your soul to function as a revolving sphere 
amid the eternal verities. As your world is the effect 
of the causality of the higher heaven planes, so ex- 
actly is your finite consciousness the result of the 
causality of your eternal mind. 

Sleep is a power, when rightly comprehended, and 
not, as commonly supposed, merely an adjunct. All 



SLEEP: ITS POWER AND USES 49 

those things which develop and beautify, giving char- 
acter, unity and proportion to the finite mind, con- 
struct your path over the bridge of the planes con- 
necting the finite with the eternal consciousness. So 
write it foundationally amid the imperishable moun- 
tain rocks of your life that you will strive to realize 
that you more truly live in sane, normal, peaceful 
sleep, always after prayer and meditation, than in 
the physically-tossed voyage on the sheets of a bed 
where you have thrown yourself to escape the storm 
of uncontrolled materialism. 

My thought has been, necessarily, of a nature that, 
in the beginning, did not permit of more finite con- 
sideration. But now, friend, I travel with you 
through your world of experience. The religion of 
good sense tells us to follow scientific, hygienic and 
sanitary law. The first law is psychological. Real- 
ize that you are superior to heredity, environment, 
passion and fear. This learn: The eight apices of a 
star of rationality write themselves seriatim as fol- 
lows : 

1. No body, physically speaking, is so diseased that na- 
ture cannot heal it. 

2. I must learn to breathe deeply, and of fresh air. 

3. With me, mastication of food must be a religious duty. 

4. Because man is over seventy-five per cent fluid, I must 
restore this fluid by drinking pure water and fre- 
quently bathing. 

5. I must practise sex control. 

6. I must become a connoisseur of the proper intellectual 
food. 

7. I must be a lover of out-door nature. 



50 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

8. I must take an interest in all that I know, and I can 
know myself only by loving another. 

Friend, these eight points of good sense are simple, 
but necessary, for even a half adherence to them will 
make your larger soul-education-hours of sleep a pe- 
riod during which causality experienced through you 
will have a direct instead of an indirect divine touch 
upon the things you feel, say and do as an individual 
in the earth plane. The eight common-sense prin- 
ciples directly control the door of entrance through 
sleep into a consciousness so ethereally beautiful, so 
rejuvenatingly powerful, so soulfully upward inclin- 
ing, that he only is in hades who locks the door against 
himself through not giving a half -compliance to the 
eight principles. 

The sure-revealing expression of character is al- 
ways gauged by the degree of normality in physical 
sleep. Sleep, so understood, is the necessary pre- 
liminary experience on a higher plane before the soul 
has escaped the holding hands of the physical. Some 
almost entirely fail to rise in sleep to eternal con- 
sciousness because of ignorance of the eight princi- 
ples, and when at last the physical body must be dis- 
pensed with, they will commence their next life little 
above and closely parallel with the last. This is the 
sombre side of an ominous fact. 

Admitting that you adhere, with at least a half- 
compliance, to the eight principles, sleep then be- 
comes a voyage of your soul through heavenly re- 
gions to where your loved ones await you with ex- 
tended arms of eternal consciousness. You journey 



SLEEP: ITS POWER AND USES 51 

in sleep to the higher planes where wisdom is im- 
parted to you and eternal conscious strength. The 
grief you have in the inverted dome of tears is com- 
prehended by you as an experience of love-warmth 
to your soul. For the more you feel (and grief is 
inner feeling) the more you become sensitive to the 
greater influence of the love-educational embrace of 
those who have passed the experience of birth through 
death to immortality. 
December 23, 1919. 



Each man was planned by the Divine as an artist to make 
the world-earth beautiful by his life. 

— Shakespeare 



BEAUTY OF BODY THROUGH SOUL 

Compiled by the Mother-group and 
Dictated by the Poetess Sappho 

The most effective curative agencies on the rolling 
physical plane are four: Breathing, Love, Music, 
Art.* The diseased physical body is the direct result- 
ant of non-use and misuse of what we term the four 
primal curative agencies. The physical material out 
of which the body is composed is a form of plastic 
clay. It can be shaped, formed, manipulated. It has, 
resident within itself, power of healing when it is in- 
jured. 

The physical body is a garment of expression in 
which the soul is dressed. If the body be hideous, 
the soul within is diseased. For all disease is within. 
There may be injury from without, but disease is 
from within. The physical body is a curtain thrown 
over the sculptured soul — that living, sensitive, pal- 
pitating, tremulous, responsive, delicate, highly- 
tensed, infinitely rare, moving, divine, essential, im- 
mortal man, created by the Master Sculptor, God. 
Your body then is a thin dress over a soul that shapes 
its lines, curves and contours as thought, which ad- 
ministers the legislation of life, carries its edicts into 
effect. 

* "Art," when used by the Twentieth Plane, signifies any graceful 
activity. 

53 



54 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

The laws that should be understood by the soul in 
order that its body-dress may be beautiful resolve 
themselves into these: Breathing, Love, Music, and 
Art, as the four universal divine physicians of sus- 
tenance and restorement. It has been thought for a 
long time that the action of the heart was the most im- 
portant physical function, but I gainsay this. These 
strong bellows of expansion and contraction, the 
lungs, control the heart ; and respiration is the process 
by which you breathe in both a physical gas and a 
spiritual thought-substance. 

Great thinking always takes place as the synchro- 
nized accompaniment of deep and rhythmic breathing; 
hence the polity of our whole teaching, and the ques- 
tion : how am I to breathe ? and where am I to breathe ? 
The Hygiene of the physical plane teaches you how 
to breathe. It is simple. Breathe always through 
the nose. Breathe deeply until the base of the lungs 
expands to the fullest extent. But more important 
than knowing how is to know where to breathe. 
Never breathe deeply in a place that is repulsive to 
you. For all who come into physical contact with an 
object psychometrize that object and that place either 
for ill or good. It is no exaggeration to say that 
nearly half of the disturbance of physical expression, 
and even a certain amount of disease, is caused by 
unconscious deep breathing when in contact with ob- 
jects psychometrized as being evilly impregnated. 
Never breathe deeply in a chamber of physical death, 
or in a hospital or a prison; nor before the degraded 
on the mart or exchange, or in the place of hypocrisy. 
Do your deep breathing on the hillside, in the home 



BEAUTY OF BODY 55 

of a friend, on the shore of the restless sea, when 
scaling the mountains of the air on the ship of a bird, 
when beholding the stars, when touching the lucent 
tresses of a loved one's hair. Rhythmically, deeply 
draw in the divine breath of life which has filtered to 
you only through the experiential chamber of pure 
objects and pure beings. It is important to know 
how to breathe, but the greatest importance is to know 
where to breathe. Let your mind direct you with 
these principles. 

You are a being of affection, and unless your affec- 
tions transmute to love, then bid adieu to health. 
Love interlocks every nerve of you, your whole physi- 
cal being with the spiritual portion of yourself, to do 
in the service of another the menial or the honourable 
task, at your most highly sensitive escapement from 
physical anchoring ropes. Love is that which con- 
duces physically to the most normal circulation of 
your blood. It is always accompanied by psychic ex- 
citation. That is why the cheeks of a maiden oft- 
times burn in the presence of her lover. That is why 
the aged resume the colour of their youth when think- 
ing of their marriage-day. They feel the glow of re- 
stored circulation. One in love with his work has the 
strength of a giant as compared with the gray cheeks 
of the driven slave. One in love is alert, and alertness 
is the most important agency for the swift circula- 
tion of the current of the fluid* vita. 

Love enables the mother to live without sleep for 
many weeks, to watch over her sick babe and then 
make up for the many weeks of sleep lost, in a single 
night, for when you love any person, though the ex- 



56 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

perience of life deny you his physical presence, limit- 
ing you to his personified ideal, you join company 
with the highest form of sculpturing energy, which 
lures you back to physical health, or what is equiva- 
lent, or of more importance, to serenity of mind. 

Human beings on the earth plane are continually 
listening to external sounds. Only when you reach 
the higher planes do you know what perfect silence 
is. On the physical plane, from the time before you 
are born, until you close all your physical doors in 
death, you are immersed in the hammering concus- 
sion of a sea of sounds. A continual dropping of 
water will cleave a granite rock. The endless force 
of the unceasing sounds around you is responsible, 
next to breathing deeply in the presence of evilly 
psychometrized persons or things, for most of the dis- 
eases of the earth plane. 

The roar of your factories, of the machinery of 
locomotion, of materialism rampant, and in the wars, 
of the hurling of missiles and of groans — all these 
things wear away the protecting walls of your ner- 
vous system. Vitality is lowered and you succumb to 
premature old age and various physical distresses un- 
less you learn to appreciate and long for music. It 
is not through mere accident that throughout all 
time certain schools have imparted their teaching to 
the accompaniment of music. For the regularity of 
the musical bar and time, and the adjustment of mere 
sound, such as that of the external world, into sooth- 
ing strains and soul-gripping harmonies, and plane- 
connecting areas — this which is music, turns a world 
of noise into an empire of glory; for music, in its 



BEAUTY OF BODY 5% 

effect on the physical body, is expansive, and feels not 
the restraint of limitation. 

One striking psychological evidence of this fact is 
that although the vast population of Russia knows 
very little of the culture of civilization, yet the people 
are virile. Disease is little known. This people for 
centuries has had a deeply beautiful music, princi- 
pally folk-songs, and as a result, they are what they 
are. The musical expression of a race is a scale with 
which to weigh their worth. In your age when ma- 
terialism is at its zenith point, music is at its lowest, 
with only here and there a saving expression in the 
voice of music. 

The physical condition of the people of the earth 
plane is ascending. Correspondingly, your music 
will improve. There is a strange interplay of mystic 
action and result between the physique and the music 
of your era. 

All that I have said thus far applies not to those 
held in the fell clasp of the vulture of disease, nor to 
those in physical or mental pain. Let us enter the 
hospital and minister to the suffering. We divide 
our cases into three groups. Those who are beyond 
all human physical help, those who are nearly in that 
condition, and those who, though sorely sick, can be 
cured. Wisdom is the correct diagnosis and inter- 
pretation of a given fact. Let us apply this method 
to the hopelessly incurable. One in the last degrees 
of tuberculosis, of various cancerous growths, or of 
the nearly complete wasting and decay of a vital 
organ, should be kindly tended and lovingly told that 
the physical garment is about to detach itself from 



58 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the soul. To this class, he is the greatest physician 
who teaches most the truth of immortality. 

On rare occasions, absolutely every form of disease 
can be cured. But disease is, in its last stages, a form 
of elimination and release of the soul intelligence 
from the physical body. Only the very greatest 
saviours of the race have had the divine wisdom by 
which to know when disease in the last stages should 
be cured. The greatest Physician of all, the Divine, 
always knows when it should be cured, and He will 
stop your disease in the last stages when you and He 
agree that, with or without the mediation of another, 
you are to be cured. The whole proof of this is the 
fact of it recurring ever since the Forum became a 
ruin and the birth of the two empires. 

Let us minister to the second group — those just 
entering or nearly entering the last stages of disease. 
Every victim of tuberculosis, cancerous growth, or 
decay of vital organs, can at one stage of their dis- 
ease be physically rehabilitated. The process is in- 
finitely simple. Disease is not disease till it makes 
a realistic mental picture on the consciousness of the 
individual. The disease must be there previously in 
order to paint its presentation on the canvas of the 
mind, all metaphysicians contrariwise notwithstand- 
ing. No footprint dints the sand without being 
made by the imprinting foot. Likewise, no disease is 
discernible by the mind without the basis of a physi- 
cally registered disease. But, through faith, through 
breathing in a proper environment, through the power 
of music, it is possible to wash off the canvas of the 
mind the first faint image, and so to cure the disease. 



BEAUTY OF BODY 59 

My instructions for the cure of this group will be 
sententious, first negative and then positive. 

Refuse to know the meaning of fear or anger. Be 
not over-certain of anything, except that mind is 
superior to body and should control it. Never be- 
come angry. Anger poisons the blood and has 
nourished more disease than all other conditions on all 
the planes. Be poised and balanced. Learn the 
power of self -repression. Be a lover. If possible be 
a father or mother. If not possible in the physical 
sense, then be a father or a mother in the artistic- 
creation sense. There is nothing more efficacious in 
curing the disease just born than industry on your 
part. The busy brain and the engaged soul always 
call most strongly upon the law of self-preservation. 
Again I reiterate that disease in its formative stages 
is usually cured just the moment when you replace 
the mental image of the disease with a higher concept 
that totally eclipses the intimation of your physical 
distress. 

I want it clearly understood that I do not deprecate 
the use of physical and mechanical agencies which ex- 
perience has proven beneficial. For in a lesser sense, 
that which aids elimination, restores digestion and as- 
similation of physical nourishment is of great service. 
There are certain schools on the earth plane such as 
the "Christian Scientist" who would not agree with 
us, and while many of them are great, good, and 
virtuous people, they misunderstand divine teaching. 
They will teach you the importance of breathing, and 
yet they are not physicists enough to know that 
breathing is a physical- chemical act as well as a 



60 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

spiritual one. This applies to their thought in re- 
spect to the drinking of pure water and living in a 
sanitary environment. On the earth plane you can- 
not separate the physical and chemical from the spir- 
itual, and Mary Baker Eddy told me so herself. 

These great schools of "Christian Science," "New 
Thought" and mental healing, with one object in com- 
mon, though somewhat divergent in method, will 
evolve, for their thought is too great to be static. In 
the open field of knowledge they will learn that a 
cynical disregard of pain and suffering is the most 
vital weakness of their systems. All three schools 
have achieved miraculous results, but they have also 
been the victims of pitiful failures. They thought 
that the reading of a prayer, the memorizing of a 
formula, the sincerity of a healer, made up for the 
neglect of the simple laws of nature. 

This brings us to the third group to whom we 
would curatively minister — those just entering into 
physical disease. He is a sinner who allows himself 
to enter this jail of pain. If you have a fair degree 
of physical health at all, there is only one other thing 
you need in order to have normal health, and that is 
a deep interest in the great things of life. The way 
to have a beneficent interest in your physical life and 
its spiritual activity, is to be an artist. 

Art is the finish applied to an achievement in order 
to make it beautiful. There are two kinds of artists : 
those who create and those who appreciate. One 
without the other would be like a lost planet wander- 
ing in a maze of discordant law. There are few 
creators on the earth plane in any branch of art. But 



BEAUTY OF BODY 61 

♦ all the other countless millions of people can have 
artistic minds. The artistic mind revels in beauty, 
is thrilled by music, feels the divine touch of an heroic 
act, knows colors as its lovers, and all nature as 
brother and sister. It plays with the river, the bird, 
the flower, and animals on their native playground. 
So the artistic mind becomes poised, exalted. It 
comes to see that it is part of the consciousness and 
vision of the Divine. It knows that all life is a library, 
and about every fact a volume has been written. It 
follows, then, that the artistic mind is never for an 
instant apart from an ever-recurring novelty of ele- 
vating incidents; and the occupied mind is either in 
the institution of normal health or in the convalescing 
home of recovery. 

You wonder, perchance, why Greece — my Greece, 
from before my day to the age of Plato, from Homer 
to Pericles, had an art, a philosophy, a literature, ex- 
pressing wisdom from the highest Olympian height. 
It was because of the merging of the soul into the 
physique, for both reached the highest point of their 
development together, as both will always reach this 
standard atwain. So collectively and individually, 
art and physical condition walked the steps of life, as- 
cending lovingly hand in hand. 

Received January 17, 1920. 



"So find yourself in the deed of performance poised and 
functioning with God's law that, for the time being, you 
become that law." 

— Savonarola 



THE SOUL AS TOUCHED BY EARTH 
AND HEAVEN 

Communicated in Tkance Address from 
Savonarola 

Brothers and Sisters: 

What do we here? Are we here to listen to truth? 
If not, then, like craven fools, let us begone. If we 
are here this sacred hour to be voices in a divine 
chorus, then, let us within the inner chamber of our 
souls listen with somewhat the stillness of death so 
that we may hear the eternal music. 

In the fifteenth century I was a priest in the 
Catholic Church. I came to Florence, the city of 
beauty and eternal wonder, of achievement in art 
which has not been equalled except on rare occasions 
elsewhere. I came to Florence and found the masses 
of the people living in luxury. Oh, they had their 
cathedrals; they were instructed by their priests. 
They were a religious people — but were they? Are 
you? We shall see. 

I found Florence had a dictator. His title was 
Lorenzo the Magnificent. A man of courage; a 
genius of great eloquence; an astute, careful, sleek 
and clever diplomat. His family for generations had 
swayed thrones through their controlling power in 
Florence. I came to Florence. I had no reputa- 
tion. They gave me an office in one of the churches. 

63 



64 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

i 

I preached a sermon or two. Only a handful of peo- 
ple assembled. I was studying the people of Flor- 
ence. I found immorality, sin, hypocrisy, and every- 
where, the lowest kinds of intrigue. They were a re- 
ligious people — on the surface. 

Then I went to a cell — this was back in the fifteenth 
century — a cell of stone and iron bars in a monastery. 
One hard chair there was. I hardly used the chair. 
I was on my knees, and I prayed unceasingly for 
thirty days. Then I saw a vision. Then I had the' 
power to perform a miracle. Then I became a 
prophet. After that, when I preached to the small 
assembly of people in the church, I felt that I had 
learned the mission of my life, for on the Sabbath day 
following the little church could not hold the people, 
so I went out of doors for it was one of those beauti- 
ful Italian summer days. There must have been 
thousands around me. 

I cannot tell you now what I said. I cannot tell 
you what the Divine said through me. I only know 
that one of my comrades, a student, afterwards told 
me something of what I said and I made the remark : 
"That must have been a terrible sermon." After 
that they made me a priest in St. Marks. St. Marks ! 
If you go to Florence to-day, you will behold that 
structure which many artists gave their lives to build. 
The people came by the thousands to hear me. This 
shows you, brothers and sisters, that no matter how 
depraved humans may become, down in their hearts 
there always remains an element of Divine, of good- 
ness, of Christ, for whatever I spoke to the people, 
I gave them terrible sermons. I told them of their 



THE SOUL 65 

sins, of their hypocrisy; I told them over and over 
again there was no use coming to the church of God 
to do penance, to sprinkle holy water on their brows 
when they had come with sin dripping from them, 
with blood, for many were assassins in those days. 
And yet, although I preached to them terrible ser- 
mons, more and more of the people came to me. 

Lorenzo the Magnificent, the great potentate, a 
dictator almost, saw in me a rival. I tried to follow 
the method of the Master, Read your history of my 
earth plane life. I have not time to tell you about 
that now, but I organized all the boys in Florence to 
be soldiers of Christ. I wrote a book called "The 
Triumph of the Cross," some of it so simply that 
mothers, at twilight, could read it to their children 
and they could understand. I had a great army of 
children in Florence organized with their captains and 
their generals, and through these little children I 
reached thousands of the people of Florence and 
made them think of God. 

Florence was a city of grandeur, of art, of music. 
The garments the people wore were beautiful beyond 
description, but the people lived for sensual things, 
for pleasure, for luxury. Some pleasure is right; 
some luxury has its proper place, but my age lived 
absolutely for these things and used religion for a 
cloak, a narcotic with which to deaden their con- 
sciences before God. I made the people think of 
their sins. I thundered at them the enormity of their 
iniquity. I played upon their emotions. Emotion 
is placed in the human being by the Divine so that 
when all other avenues fail you can sometimes sway 



66 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

a man. The Italian people are an emotional race. I 
so played upon their emotional natures that there 
came a day when all the population of the province 
assembled in the market square bringing with them 
their paintings, their books — a great many of the 
books of that time were of a nature that should be 
burned — their vanities, and a match was set to these 
material things representing the base thought of the 
people and these flames reached to heaven, I had 
constructed a platform on which I could stand hold- 
ing a cross aloft. Before I reached the platform to 
speak to the people, one came to me who said: "I am 
a wealthy merchant. Your church is in need of 
money. I will give you for this great mass of things 
which you are about to burn, a fortune." I put my 
arms around him, drew him to me and kissed him on 
the cheek, looked him in the eyes and saved his soul. 
He bowed his head in shame and went away. Later, 
I met him. He was a saved man. Sometimes, no 
matter how wonderful your eloquence, how literary 
your power of expression, words fail, but the majesty 
of your personality awes all words into silence. 
Then acts are done through you rather than that you 
perform the acts, and you save a soul. 

Lorenzo the Magnificent had genius, genius 
greater almost than all the combined faith of us pray- 
ing monks. We had to watch him not with our own 
eyes, but with the protecting eyes of God, looking 
through the vision of our souls. This man tried 
strategy to lead me from my course. I could have 
become — and this was my earth plane temptation — 
almost king in Italy through the wealth and power ol 



THE SOUL 67 

this man. He offered it to me. I refused it. 

Came a day when this man Lorenzo the Magnifi- 
cent lay upon his death-bed. I had entreated him to 
become a simple, kindly leader of the people. He 
never refused me openly. It is not the way of great- 
ness. He had, though, a skilful way of evading all 
my entreaty and prayer. In his castle, in his room of 
splendour, this mighty man lay on his death-bed. It 
was a surprise to me when a courier came and said, 
"Friar, Lorenzo is dying. They have asked you to 
come." Let me deliberately and as subtly as I can 
give you the absolute facts of that occasion. 

The courier came and said: "Friar, Lorenzo is 
dying. He has asked for you." I said to him: "I 
will make ready and go at once." Never will I for- 
get that night. On my way to the death-chamber, I 
saw around me angels. I heard music that I knew 
was the music of the heaven-world. It was past the 
noon of night. One face that rose before me in this 
vision was that of a girl whose refusal of my hand 
had determined my course, as a young man, to be- 
come a monk. I went to the chamber of Lorenzo 
with all the tenderness of my mother. I went into 
his presence with womanly tenderness in my heart. 
Into his magnificent presence, for, even in death, the 
man was grand. 

He lay upon the bed of death. You know that 
hectic flush that is upon the cheek of those who die 
while the intellect is yet extremely alert. His in- 
telligence seemed to be intensified by the last physical 
struggle, and those great, wide, luminous eyes seemed 
like doors of heaven ajar, so great was the light of 



68 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

his consciousness, and I was before Lorenzo the 
Magnificent. 

He said to me: "Father, I am dying. I ask for 
absolution." 

I said to him : "Lorenzo, my son," and I held the 
crucifix in my hand, "on three conditions I give you 
absolution." 

"Name them," he said. I did. 

I draw an impenetrable curtain over the first two 
conditions. These were confidences between Lorenzo 
and myself. The third condition was : 

"Lorenzo, will you restore the liberties of the peo- 
ple of Florence?" 

The first and second conditions he agreed to in- 
stantly. The third condition being named, he turned 
to me, his face as hard as stone, and said, "No." 

"Then," I said, "I cannot absolve you;" and I did 
not, and he died. Call me wicked? Was I cruel to 
speak this way to a dying man? God spoke that way 
to me. I could do no other. 

Such was the death of one of the great leaders of 
the Italian people. Later, because Lorenzo the 
Magnificent ceased to be, power, politically and 
spiritually, made me a storm centre. Pope Alex- 
ander sent me letters from Rome imploring me to 
cease preaching to the people. The church of Rome 
was, in the fifteenth century, a cruel conglomeration 
of selfish statesmen who, under the guise of religion, 
sought to obtain material power. Do not smile in 
derision. Your age parallels that with its iniquity, 
its selfishness, its materialism. The terrible sermons 
that they said I preached in Florence in the fifteenth 



THE SOUL 69 

century could be preached to your age, and a truth- 
ful man could not stand up before the face of God 
and deny their accusations. 

My power grew, but temporal power reaches a 
zenith, then disintegrates. I refused to compromise 
with the Pope even though threatened with excom- 
munication; then they arrested me. The Pope knew 
that his power over the people of Italy depended on 
my recantation, which being published, would have 
proved me to be a false prophet. 

I was taken to the torture chamber. . . . How 
they mangled my body ! O God ! I can understand 
how Jesus cried aloud : "Father, why hast Thou for- 
saken me?" "Do you recant?" My only reply was 
a smile. Then I became delirious. They had their 
stylist publish my words, and they said: "This is his 
recantation." For three days this went on. When 
my brain became clear, they asked: "Do you re- 
cant?" My only reply was a smile. Then they con- 
demned me to be hanged and burned. 

I had one friend, Fra Domenico, and another, Fra 
Silvestro. These two refused to loosen their al- 
legiance to me in that last hour. The tragedy of it 
is that so few stood with me in the hour of death and 
suffered with me. Those who were most demonstra- 
tive in their expressions of loyalty deserted me when 
they saw that Pope Alexander was determined that 
I and my followers should die. 

Came a day when I knew that on the morrow I 
must die. My comrades Domenico and Silvestro 
were told that I had repudiated all my teaching. I 
was told that they had repudiated all their teaching. 



70 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

That night I saw Jesus. He came close to me and 
said: "Girolamo, Silvestro and Domenico have not 
repudiated the truth of your teaching. Both are 
steadfast and loyal to you. Ask on the morrow for 
an interview with them. ..." 

In the early morning, the gaoler came to me with 
my food, the food of dogs, and I looked him in the 
eyes and said: "One favour I crave of thee this day. 
I want to see Domenico and Silvestro who are to die 
with me. ..." They brought me into a large room. 
I looked at Domenico who was to die with me, at 
Silvestro who was to die with me. I saw they were 
pure, simple children of God, and would die as be- 
came brave men. These two men, about to die with 
me, were my brothers. . . . 

The three of us were hanged and burned. Our 
ashes were put on a cart, taken through the streets 
of Florence, and thrown into the river Arno.* 

All the sin, the iniquity, even the ecclesiastical in- 
trigue of my day is exactly paralleled in yours. Mil- 
lions of your people are noble, pure and near God. 
So they were in the fifteenth century. So they were 
in every century of time after the first dim centuries 
of complete barbarism. The divine would raise up 
from the people true priests, not necessarily of any 
denomination. These priests must needs be men and 
women of education and character to teach the peo- 
ple through the genuineness of their lives. 

Your age should recognize that it is easy and noble 
to be good; that the most difficult thing is to be bad. 

* In the public address Savonarola named the River Po. Subse- 
quently I was asked in his name to change it to the Arno, as he had by 
an inadvertence made this mistake, naming the larger river. 



THE SOUL 71 

You have to reason with your conscience, to make ex- 
cuses. Your little sin leads to a greater, till your 
whole life becomes one of deception. So it goes on 
till all your brain, working at an enormous rate of 
action, all the substance of your soul is utilized in 
trying to explain to yourself what you can never ex- 
plain to God, the reason for committing unnatural 
sins. But if you would live as God would have you 
live: simple as a child, loving as a mother, firm as a 
man must sometimes be in a crisis, then, I say that 
after the first few months of discipline, which will be 
extremely hard, requiring fasting and prayer, a good 
life becomes easy. 

There will arise on the earth plane a man and a 
woman whose eloquence and teaching will be of such 
a burning nature that whole nations will tremble in 
listening to their thought. Before they come, a gen- 
eration of simple men and women will make ready for 
the arrival of these two great leaders whose burning 
words will pulverize and disintegrate the sins of your 
civilization. 

In ail the cities I hear the people rejoicing. I see 
your cathedrals filled with people worshipping in the 
proper spirit. Glory has come to your age. God is 
all powerful. The universe is governed by natural, 
just and divine laws. Human beings use only a few, 
but there are millions of them. As you reach one 
plane, and then a higher and a higher plane, you come 
into contact with higher, wider and less limited divine 
laws. When the halt, the maimed, the blind were 
brought to Jesus, he asked them only one question: 
"Do you believe?" If they said, "Yea, Master, I be- 



72 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lieve," a so-called miracle was performed. In most 
instances they were healed. What did Jesus do? 
For I would teach you how to do such things. He 
reached just a little above the atmosphere of your 
world till he touched higher laws and set these in 
operation, and so healed the blind and sometimes re- 
stored limbs. I found that to some extent I could 
heal sickness also. 

There are no laws which you cannot employ if your 
purpose is just and divine. The way for you to per- 
form miracles for the suffering people is this: So 
find yourself in the deed of performance poised and 
functioning with God's law that, for the time being, 
you become that law. There is a law superior to 
every disturbance and injury that can take place in 
the physical body. Through desire, through prayer, 
through love, you can enter into the realm of these 
laws and have what the Bible speaks of as the gift 
of "the laying on of hands." 

What you do when you lay your hands on the brow 
of one who is sick is that your soul, your physical 
body, the sick soul of the diseased, his physical body, 
all begin to function as one great heart and soul. In 
that moment pray that you be lifted up into the realm 
of higher laws, then — you perform what the world 
calls a miracle. 

My hope, Brothers and Sisters, is that on this oc- 
casion, when amid the maze and difficulty of the pas- 
sage of my thought through the brain of another — 
through the brain of a physical being — some words of 
truth will come to you that will bring you home to 
God. Amen. 



Do you ever stop to ask why there is so much beauty in 
the universe? It is the way the universe has of asking you 
to time your life with the eternal Beauty displayed all over 
the face of the great universe. 



THE OVER-CONSCIOUSNESS 

Emerson 

The difficulty of all psychic communication (and 
I wish you to emphasize this idea when you have op- 
portunity) is that the authentic response comes when 
your Instrument is in a trance condition. Let us 
suppose that his intelligence is composed of strings 
which we vibrate to get our thought through to you. 
These strings should vibrate without disturbing the 
intelligence of your Instrument. Occasionally there 
is collision between our thought and his, and this will 
cause error. 

The human mind is made up of the conscious and 
the "subconscious." The memory which concerns the 
habits of your life resides in the conscious mind of 
the physical, the human brain. At death it entirely 
vanishes. The "subconscious" has an angle of its 
own. Thoughts that have to do entirely with the 
building of your character, the development of your 
soul, particularly with love experience — the love ex- 
perience of a mother when she looks into the eyes of 
her new-born babe, the last words a son hears from his 
expiring mother, or when a comrade dies upon the 
battlefield, attended by one who in life was an entire 
stranger, but who is now ministering to him, when 
this stranger, looking into the eyes of the dying sol- 
dier, murmurs: "I will write your people and tell 

75 



76 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

them you died a hero" — these things enter into the 
subconscious and remain there forever. Soul experi- 
ence remains with you when you reach this world of 
light and love. The subconscious mind is the one 
that enters the other life and finds its home in the 
other body. 

Death is the scale in which you weigh that knowl- 
edge or memory which will be of value to you. You 
will dispense with that which is, in reality, nothing 
more than debris. A great deal of earth plane 
memory is inferior. It is necessary while on that 
plane, but it absolutely is not necessary in this life. 
It is dissipated in the elements of this life and ceases 
to be. 
September 15, 1919. 

Deep down in the recesses of your consciousness, 
you realize that you control, to a great extent, your 
attitude towards life. You do control; you are the 
government ; you are the power. You have absolute 
control over the attitude you assume towards life. 
That stage in your development when self-conscious- 
ness came to you, when you realized yourself as some- 
thing different from your environment, when you be- 
came an identity, that was the moment when you had 
the power of decision, of controlling your attitude 
towards life. 

You have passed through the experience of a war 
on the earth plane that made you feel deep within 
your soul all the emotions, all the love, all the mysti- 
fication that could be encompassed within the bounda- 
ries of four years. Through the years of the war, 



THE OVER-CONSCIOUSNESS 77 

you have been a people thinking as you have never 
thought before. And this goes on. It is the domi- 
nating feature in your further progress. 

I see this question in your minds : "But is not my 
attitude towards life governed to some extent by ex- 
ternal conditions, by my worries and fears, by my 
business, by my relations, by all the common factors 
of my life?" Yes, but these things are extraneous, 
and before they regulate the attitude of your lif e, they 
must ask you, for with you remains ultimately the 
final decision. 

"But," you say, "is this true of one with a poor, 
puny, immature intellect as it would be of one with 
large comprehension and illimitable vision?" No, it 
is not as true of the puny intellect as it is of the man 
of genius, but, to the extent of your responsibility, 
determined by your ability, your knowledge, your 
education, you are master of your destiny ; you are the 
captain of the ship ; you are the general in command 
of the army, you give the commands. You give to 
the army of your life those commands which will cause 
you to have a beautiful, a divine attitude towards life. 

On the earth plane beings seem to have forgotten 
this lesson. They drift; they do not emerge. They 
are blown by the winds. They do not stand upon a 
strong foundation. Worry will never cause disturb- 
ance to the nervous system if you observe the ordi- 
nary laws of hygiene, of duty and of clear thinking. 
Dispel fear from your life. Have something else 
move in and take its place. There is an infinite 
variety of things which will dispel fear and worry 
by moving into your life. Read every day some 



78 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

beautiful poem. Listen to some masterpiece of 
music. 

If these things are not possible, remember that the 
human soul is a theatre. I heard William Shake- 
speare say: "Most lives are an empty theatre: all the 
actors of joy have fled." Should your life be a de- 
serted theatre? It should not be. But if it is, then 
listen to your own inspirations. To some extent 
every man and woman can commune with those in the 
world from which I speak. Let your prayer cease to 
be that miserable thing which requests something al- 
ways for yourself. Let your prayer be a deep, sweet 
meditation in which you tune the things of your life 
with that which woos and loves you with its beauty. 

Do you ever stop to ask why there is so much 
beauty in the universe? It is the way the universe 
has of asking you to tune your life with the eternal 
beauty displayed all over the face of the great uni- 
verse. The final difference between the emancipated 
plane on which I live and your physical world is this : 
you discover too quickly your limitations. You 
manufacture many limitations which you think exist, 
and as long as you think they exist, they are limita- 
tions. Here we find that limitations recede. We 
have limitations here, but not nearly the number with 
which you surround yourselves. 

Listen! You grow old too quickly — all of you 
with hardly an exception. Why grow old? The 
body becomes weak. True, but you are not your 
physical body. You are an immortal. You are a 
soul. Do not manufacture then unnecessary limita- 



THE OVER-CONSCIOUSNESS 79 

tions. One of the unnecessary limitations you manu- 
facture is that when you reach thirty or forty years of 
age, you make no more friends, and you even lose 
some of the friends vou have. That is one of the 
most pathetic things on the earth plane. Worthy 
friends are as important as your religion. Each 
friend you make reveals to you a different phase of 
the consciousness of the universe. You are a part of 
such a consciousness for the express reason that you 
can, in a measure, comprehend , that consciousness. 
The wisest way to comprehend the consciousness of 
the universe is through individuals. Do this through 
your kindred, those nearest to you, but do not stop 
there. Those you are in closest contact with, par- 
ticularly through relationship of blood, you exhaust 
because you are so closely related to them physically. 
Each year make some new friends. Discover some 
one to whom you can tell all the secrets of your life, 
and whom you can inspire to come to you in that 
sweet, frank confession of friendship. You will thus 
learn more of life, more of God, more of yourself, 
than otherwise you could learn through centuries. 

I know how the war has battered your belief. I 
know how your economic system has made it almost 
impossible to understand some of the things that oc- 
cur on earth. I know how physically you are sick. 
But, can you not see that if God made you in one 
instant so strong that all things became easy in your 
life, that would be no credit to you? Where then 
is the sovereignty of your character ? God did it, not 
you. Those things which you accomplish in your life 






80 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

through the vicissitudes of existence purify the soul, 
and there is no other way in heaven or earth for it to 
be done. 

Be serene and happy. Move cheerfully with the 
forces of the universe. You are part of the forces. 
Do not expect them without your effort to help you 
to move towards an ever increasing and higher ideal. 
You are placed in a physical body in a material world 
by the Divine to learn lessons of great moment to 
your soul. I see a spiritual renaissance in your soul, 
but you seem to be happy in assuming responsibilities, 
in suffering, in worrying, in fretting. Many seem 
to enjoy the agonies of an erroneously regulated life. 
This is a disease. You are strong in mind and body 
only when the normal attitude of your life causes you 
to enjoy meeting friends and to love the world in 
which you live. 

Brothers and sisters, you make the world in which 
you live. You make your friends. You control and 
regulate your life and the attitude of your life 
towards the immensities of all life. The attitude of 
your own life can be stated categorically and then I 
am finished: 

Review your life. Discover wherein you have 
failed. There is a great informing agency in every 
life. You require little time for contemplation in 
order to know your sin. I have told you how to 
eliminate sin — have something more worthy move in. 

Be compassionate. Most of you are cynical but do 
not know it. Do not allow yourself to cavil at this, 
to sneer at that. You become strong and wholesome 
and worthy and near to the heart of the Divine by 



THE OVER-CONSCIOUSNESS 81 

contemplating strong and worthy and divine things. 
Do not tell me you have not such things in your world 
to contemplate. You have your libraries, your 
dramas, and above all, you have your friends. Your 
own life will be crammed with beautiful things if you 
regulate your attitude towards them. You are all 
kings, my brothers and sisters. No man yet, though 
he had the genius of a Shakespeare, the philosophy of 
a Kant, the poetry of a Goethe, the science of a Fara- 
day, ever used all the power he possessed nor even 
estimated it. You are all inexhaustible vessels of 
power. Let some emergency come into your life and 
then you surprise the whole community by the power 
you demonstrate. It was there all the time, and the 
only reason you did not use it is that your attitude 
towards life is one of imaginary limitations. 

Be lovers. Contemplate all the virtue you can dis- 
cover in another, and you will be amazed to learn that 
you discover the virtue in others because it is in your- 
self. May that God who has given us the power to 
control the attitudes of our lives give us strength of 
mind and heart and soul to know that we do indeed 
control our own destiny. 

There never lived an individual who did not find 
life, at times, a dreary road. If the roads we traverse 
were all balmy, strewn with flowers, and soft to walk 
on, their monotony would nauseate us with a weary 
though beautiful stretch, ad infinitum. But as we 
tread the rough bouldered highway, if we could meet 
with some object that would give a different concep- 
tion — a different lesson with a changed motive — and 
so teach the purpose of life in a more comprehensible 



82 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

way, then would we listen to the voice of nature and 
be quiet long enough to hear what she has to say. 

So I instruct you to meet this thought in a practical 
and constructive way. The whole secret is out when 
you meet a friend. The great sin on the earth plane 
is the static position you take when your friends are 
all made. The year when you do not add some new 
friend to your company is a year of little progression 
in life. 

As all men live on one universe, and all are differ- 
ent, each comprehending something in the universe 
which has not entered into your experience, all you 
learn is for the purpose of teaching it to others. Man 
is a divine companion of sociability, so the truth of all 
worth which arises from this thought is: alter your 
conception of life by discovery deeper than a Raleigh 
knew, or a Columbus experienced, or a Copernicus 
enjoyed. Discover new friends whose conception of 
life will alter your attitude when it would become 
static, making it as fluid as the Falls of Niagara. 

March 14, 1920. 



"The great souls of the universe will learn — and all souls 
are great — that in the splendid hours of life they will occa- 
sionally step out of personality, forget they are individuals 
and be immersed in the immensity of all thought." 

— Emerson. 

The superficial intellectual mind is absolutely dependent 
upon physical adjustment to a physical world, and outside 
of that world it is non-existent. 

— Coleridge. 



THE MIND OF MAN 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Let us at once dispense with the solecism and 
misnomer of words connoting the human mind. 
There is no such thing as the human mind. There 
is only one mind in the universe, and it is not human, 
for it is imperishable. Obviously, this is not the state- 
ment of a platitude, for it contradicts earth plane 
references to the mind of man, and yet if you grant, 
as many of your greatest thinkers do, that the soul 
is the mind, our whole case is acquiesced in by those 
who believe in immortality, and that means nearly 
all the earth plane race. 

There is, I will grant you, a superficial intellectual 
phase of consciousness which you may properly call 
human, but if you do so, be sure that you refer to 
this mind only as one phase, and one of the lowest 
forms, of consciousness. The intellectual faculties 
of a human being belong to the consciousness of his 
plane. The proof of this is that he is not an educated 
soul within the realm of that plane until his intellect- 
ual mind functions in accord with his physical world. 

The superficial intellectual mind is absolutely dependent 
upon physical adjustment to a physical world, and outside 
of that world it is non-existent. 

— Coleridge. 

There are very few thinkers who would say that 

85 



86 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the intellectual mind in a human being is his entire 
consciousness, and the greatest of them would hesi- 
tate before saying it is the most important part of his 
consciousness. In your world now, I understand, 
they rarely if ever say that mind cannot exist apart 
from matter. If this is so, then our chief enquiry 
has to do with the study of the consciousness of man 
in all its phases: physical, intellectual, spiritual, and 
divine. 

One meets the physical psychologist on his own 
ground when one says that the human mind cannot 
exist apart from environment and the power to func- 
tion in that environment. Give an individual an 
anaesthetic, and he loses for a time the power of 
superficial intellectual thought. But do we entirely 
suppress the power of perception and conception in 
the larger mind, the soul? Positively, the example 
of loss of consciousness due to an anaesthetic is an 
exact parallel of loss of consciousness resulting from 
physical death. So the loss of consciousness due to 
an anaesthetic simply leaves you in a negative posi- 
tion as regards the suppression of your mind, the soul. 

The larger mind of man, his soul, is a portion of 
the divine Mind, the great all-comprehending con- 
sciousness of the Universe. The soul of man is a 
portion of the soul of God. It may be strictly termed 
a disassociated portion of divine consciousness born 
in man so as to form his individuality. The Divine 
allows, under certain conditions, communion between 
the divine intelligence in man and his lower mind. 
This is the language of communion and inspiration. 

The earth plane has erroneously called this larger 



THE MIND OF MAN 87 

mind the subconscious, the subliminal, etc. Your in- 
tellectual mind is the servant of the soul always and 
forever. There is no such thing as the subconscious 
mind, nor the subliminal, despite the teaching of 
Leibnitz, Hartmann, Hamilton, or Hudson. Human 
thought — that thought which is unceasingly flowing 
through the infinite mind of man and its finite ex- 
tension, the intellect — is for the most part resultant 
from the suggestion of his soul. Some of it is the 
common thinking that results from physical circum- 
stances and external conditions. But the major por- 
tion of your deepest and most important thought is 
suggestion handed up to finite consciousness by the 
thinking of the soul. 

Just as the most important thought of a human be- 
ing results from the suggestions of his soul, so that 
thought, in turn, emanates from the great Mind of 
the Universe, the One Soul, the One Consciousness — 
all forms of thought of a definite quality may be said 
to be the result of the Universe speaking in your soul, 
and your soul repeating them through your intellect- 
ual mind so that you are then, as Jesus said, gods, 
doing the work of the Father on high. 

If your mind reverts to the incidents of even a few 
weeks ago, most of it seems like a dream. Compare 
even important things that happened a few years ago 
with your last vivid dream and you will find one about 
as real to your consciousness as the other. You will 
find when you reach the astral world that your think- 
ing was mostly the doing of your soul. Intellectual 
things are real only where time is an element, and in 
the province of the soul there is no such thing as 



88 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

time. Therefore the soul is an unboundaried em- 
pire where the only permanent thoughts come for the 
permanent building up of the ego. 

These conclusions, almost accepted now by out- 
standing philosophers on the earth plane, are the com- 
mon knowledge of the merest tyro on the astral 
planes. The soul of man is not a subconscious mind 
nor a subliminal attribute of mind. Mind is the 
divine Breath that has been breathed into matter. 

It is said that the subconscious mind is that faculty 
within man which remembers all things. It cannot 
forget anything. It is not to a very great extent con- 
trolled by man. It is like the shifting waves of a 
stormy sea. Sometimes when the physical brain is in 
a certain physiological condition, the subconscious 
mind talks through man like a God, at others like an 
idiot. They claim further that if a subject be thrown 
into the hypnotic condition, the subconscious mind 
will, under the influence of hypnotism, impersonate 
individuals, ideas, and all forms of mental action. So 
the opponents of spiritism say that there is a deep 
phase of consciousness which is without character, 
without control, and yet possessive of a fiendish 
cleverness which would people the universe as a hell 
with a population whose units are the souls of all the 
worlds. 

This theory of the subconscious mind must be dis- 
posed of once for all for the reason that, as a single 
factor, it is responsible for the destruction of more 
faith than any other we know of. The great soul of 
man is his immortal mind which gradually (for the 
gradual accumulation of knowledge is the only form 



THE MIND OF MAN 89 

of real education) cognizes the universe and all that 
it contains. 

Realizing that there is no subconscious mind, but a 
soul, and that soul an expression of consciousness, the 
method by which you as an individual know God, 
yourself, and your world is to me the greatest truth 
I have learned since reaching this plane. Man is a 
definite creation of God, a detached portion of Him- 
self, who, because He is a Father and you His sons 
and daughters, has given you a world of your own in 
which to live, and up to a certain point to be supreme, 
the sole arbiter of its destiny. 

Within the compass of yourself, you are the only 
god, but when you reach out just a little from your- 
self, you encounter other gods, and this reaching out 
and contact with other souls in the collective sense 
is God Himself. To me all the worlds contributed 
their wisdom and beauty and built this monument to 
truth: God is love because all other beings are like 
myself, souls. They live because they think. I 
think, and thought is my life. We all live in the same 
universe, governed only by the demand of the condi- 
tions of a plane. We have the same passions, emo- 
tions, ideals and experiences in common, differing 
only in their form of expression from all other beings. 
In a word, I am so much like my brother that now 
I can understand in its cryptic, esoteric, literal, 
poetical, and literary meaning that God made man in 
His own image. 

If a man is a part of the Intelligence of the uni- 
verse, then we must expel forever from our cur- 
riculum of thought the idea that man possesses a dual 



90 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

mind. He does not. He has only one mind on every 
plane, and as I have said elsewhere: one conscious- 
ness alone there is, and the sincere soul utilizes the 
universe for a brain. Those who have a great edu- 
cation will utilize not only their own plane and all 
that it contains for a brain, but will likewise use the 
consciousness of higher planes, and passing from edu- 
cation to cosmic consciousness, the whole universe in 
very truth becomes their brain. Astral thinkers 
know that the soul of man on the earth plane once, 
if not oftener, in a lifetime, for a period in which 
time is non-existent, has become the total conscious- 
ness of a plane. The soul with cosmic consciousness 
is not governed by time, space, distance, or any physi- 
cal limitations. The first real indication of this is the 
development of thought transference in your world. 
This is only a first step. Soon on the earth plane 
nations will know that a whole race can create a na- 
tional mental state, a mood, an attitude, which will 
make it possible for the masses, as distinguished from 
individuals, to receive great inspiration. 

Finally, the great souls of the universe will learn — 
and all souls are great — that in the splendid hours of 
life, they will occasionally step out of personality, 
forget they are individuals and be immersed in the 
immensities of all thought. These are the reasons I 
advance for saying that the soul is mind, and that the 
human intellect is but a transitory servant of such a 
soul. 



YOUR QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 

This chapter, like most of those in this volume, 
was suggested by the Mother Group, in this case by 
my mother herself. The reader will see at once the 
value of questions proposed by earth plane people 
with answers by people on the heaven planes. 

Nearly all the questions were handed to me from 
audiences. They were read to the audience imme- 
diately. They were answered instantly by the per- 
sons whose names precede the answers, through the 
lips of Louis Benjamin while he was in trance. 

Naturally, the questions will have unequal interest 
to the reader. Some answers may be difficult for 
some readers to understand. Nevertheless, this chap- 
ter, containing questions which a hundred people (or 
more) saw handed to me and observed the immediacy 
of the answers, must make a strong appeal to the 
reader. At least it contains enough truth to en- 
noble the soul if it be observed and put into the life. 

If the critical examiner of this revelation, having 
read the chapter entitled Facts in Evidence, will read 
this chapter, and then turn to that entitled Messages 
of Fifty-five Souls Through One Soul, and having 
read all carefully, will consider the adequacy of the 
old theories of explanation, he will meet with a prob- 
lem of deep interest. 

1. Is Jesus the Nazarene an inhabitant of the Twentieth 

Plane or an instructor there? 

91 



92 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Arts.: (By Silvestro.) Jesus is an inhabitant of all the 
planes ; His home is the universe. 

2. What methods ought to be used to obtain justice on 
the earth? 

Ans.: (By Silvestro.) Apply the teachings of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, use common sense, and pray un- 
ceasingly. 

3. Did Pythagoras, Paul, Savonarola, Hugo, Spinoza and 
others speak in English to the Instrument, or did he 
somehow understand their several languages and trans- 
late them? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) None of them spoke in any 
language to the Instrument. All of them thought their 
ideas through the instrumentality of the being of the 
Instrument, which thought was translated into your 
vocabulary and language by his intelligence. 

4. Since you passed over have you arrived at any better 
conception of God the Father than Jesus Christ gave 
us? 

Ans.: (By Savonarola.) I received from the teachings 
of Jesus Christ the conception that God's heart is one 
of infinite love and tender compassion. I can conceive 
of no more glorious conception of the Father. 

5. What is the difference between the Twentieth Plane and 
spiritualism? 

Ans.: (By Silvestro.) The difference between the 
Twentieth Plane and spiritualism depends absolutely 
on discrimination. To leave selfishness out of one's 
questions and not to make them personal in the ma- 
terialistic sense; to believe that the teaching from the 
Twentieth Plane is a revelation and not merely a per- 
sonal direction or instruction ; this constitutes the chief 
difference between the ordinary objectionable practices 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 93 

from which spiritualism is now endeavouring to free 
itself and the communication that flows through from 
the Twentieth Plane. 

6. If friends on the higher planes are helpful; if so many 
families need the comfort of their word; why does the 
intelligence communicating as reported on page twenty 
in The Twentieth Plane say it is dangerous to talk to 
another plane? Is there to be any communication, and 
if so, under what circumstances is it permissible? 
Ans.: (By Coleridge.) It is not wise, in a haphazard, 
indiscriminate, curious way to seek communication from 
the physically departed. If it were the wisest thing 
for communication to be common, it would not be the 
extremely rare thing that it is. Communication be- 
tween earth plane people and spirits, so called, must 
be an ethical matter entirely, and must have for its- 
purpose the securing of knowledge for the people and 
not for the individual. Communication of a very high 
order takes place unceasingly. But one of the main 
reasons why you should not employ a psychic is that 
those who have made it common have commercialized 
the practice, with the result that unfinished intelligences 
of the lower planes have operated in your seance rooms. 

7. Did Jesus so spiritualize His physical body that he 
raised it also from the tomb? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) No. He could easily have done 
so, but the fallacy of such a course is extremely appar- 
ent. What the disciples saw at the resurrection was 
his astral or spiritual body, the body possessed by 
each member of the human race, that body in which 
the soul functions when it leaves the physical body. No 
resurrected physical body would have had the glory of 
the body beheld by His disciples. 

Those who have studied the trial of Jesus before 



M BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Pilate are aware that Pilate hardly knew what to do 
with the accused. He was halting. He hesitated. He 
asked advice. This was contrary to his usual method, 
which was one of rapid expedition. Pilate was wise 
enough to know that the great personality of Jesus 
had tremendously impressed the people of his time. 
Jesus was crucified. Even then, Pilate knew not what 
course to follow. 

The body was given to some friends who placed it in 
some kind of grave — a toml> — and a great rock was 
rolled before the entrance, blocking it up. The dark- 
ness that suffused that portion of the earth, darkness 
black as ink in the daytime, the rumblings heard in the 
earth, and other miraculous events, made Pilate and 
his advisers deeply conscious of something stupendous 
in the personality of the one crucified. 

Naturally they said: "If He be the Messiah, His 
physical body may arise and He live again." So se- 
cretly, at night, Pilate sent soldiers who removed the 
body and had it burned so that when the disciples and 
others came to look within the tomb the body was gone. 

8. What is thought and where does it come from? Is it 
inspiration ? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) Thought emanates from the 
source of all intelligence, the Divine. Inspiration is 
this thought-energy when it can be made of use and 
can be employed as an instrument of service. 

9. Will you explain the notable departure in the commu- 
nications of Jesus, as reported in The Twentieth Plane, 
from His epigrammatic style as shown in the Sermon 
on the Mount? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) The reader will look for epi- 
grams from the Master, but it should be remembered 
that, of all His spoken words, only very few were writ- 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 95 

ten down. These survived because they were more epi- 
grammatic than His other words. Even the few say- 
ings which were reported have in some cases been 
changed by interpolation and elimination, for theologi- 
cal reasons. 

10. In ordinary human experience, thought seems to de- 
pend entirely upon the functioning of the physical brain. 
When that organ is seriously diseased or injured, in- 
sanity, unconsciousness or death ensues. How can it 
be shown that the individual continues to think after 
the physical brain, because of death, has ceased to 
function? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) In the physical world, when 
the physical brain becomes diseased to the extent that 
consciousness is utterly suppressed, it cannot be shown 
(in the physical world) that the soul is functioning in 
an expression of conscious thought. Neither can it be 
shown that the soul is not deeply at work thinking and 
realizing in a universe of reality. 

If the physical brain is but partially diseased, a ra- 
tional thought expressed occasionally in an intellectual 
way satisfies the psychologist of the earth plane at 
once that, granting that there is such a thing as the 
soul, it is functioning in a world of thought. 

Oftentimes the extent of the knowledge of the soul 
is so great that the brain is not equal to its required 
functions, and so collapses. You call this insanity. 
Often the solitude and seclusion more than repays, by 
its effect upon the evolution of that particular soul, 
for the physical pain endured by the individual and 
his relatives. 

You ask how one in the physical world may be posi- 
tive of these things. I reply that faith, hope and the 
apparent justice of it all are not deceivers even of the 



96 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

intellectual brain. Faith, hope and justice, in every 
century, have been the only things that have preserved 
the sanity of the people. Without these the human 
race would have been annihilated long ago. 

11. Is it possible to lengthen human life indefinitely and 
hold it in eternal youth in order to be of service to 
humanity? 

Ans.: (By Fra Domenico.) The physical must obey 
the spiritual. If there were necessity for such a course, 
the spiritual could lengthen out forever the days of 
the physical. 

12. Two personalities, Spinoza and Disraeli, are said to be 
one ego. How is it they both speak to us? 

Ans.: (By Spinoza.) When the soul becomes a per- 
sonality in the first instance, it has commenced to live 
a personal identity life. We have learned here on the 
Twentieth Plane that every soul has within its reach the 
attainment of genius. Further, we have learned that, 
genius once attained, the soul may make, for the pur- 
pose of humanitarianism and teaching, not only one 
physical body visit, but many. We know of genius 
souls that have journeyed back to the earth plane 
through a hundred different physical bodies. I who 
answer this question, Benedict Spinoza, was reincar- 
nated in physical bodies in your world many times. 
The best known expressions of my ego were as Bene- 
dict Espinoza and Benjamin Disraeli. It naturally 
follows that the essential ego can recall for use the old 
earth plane characteristics, so I have come from this 
plane on occasion as Spinoza and as Disraeli. 

13. Is it possible in this age to compose great; original 
music basing it on fundamental melody, or are all avail- 
able melodies of foundation character exhausted? 
Ans.: (By Paganini.) I look upon a great composer 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 97 

as one who sees, feels and hears the subject of his com- 
position, and I am sure that the great composer does 
not hear, see and feel the theme or motif of his music 
unless he is living the life of a great melody. 

Art is that in every soul which urges the individual 
to do some one genius thing in a superlative way. In 
music the acme height is reached when a melody is made 
of the composer's own interpretation of some grand 
conception he has heard and observed as through his 
soul poured all that his consciousness was divinely 
aware of. 

As melody of rapturous excellence of sound-harmony 
is beyond a display of technique, and such melody will 
alwa}'s lie just bej T ond the most extraordinary use of 
harmonics, it is a musical solecism to say that melodies 
will ever be exhausted. The prudes and pseudo-masters 
of music, the mediocre leaders of conservatories in every 
age, have said, "Now is melody exhausted. Our re- 
sort is to an invention of new harmonics and tonal ef- 
fects, and the use of every artifice that will substitute 
the artificial for that which is natural." Every age 
gave the lie to such sophistry. There has always been 
and will be sufficient melody in the ever-singing voices 
whose echoes finite perceptions catch and make into the 
music of the physical world. 

14. Why have many of the best psychic results been se- 
cured in semi- or complete darkness and why is it that 
certain and subdued lights have been found necessary 
particularly for etherealizations and materializations? 

Arts.: (By Coleridge.) It was never intended that 
psychic manifestations should be frequent on the earth 
plane, and so the great Chemist (God) placed in the 
light-waves of the physical world the actinic power of 
purple rays. They neutralize the rare etheric gas 
through which is projected thought from the astral 



98 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

world, the energy necessary for etherealizations and 
materializations to be effected, and all forms of psychic 
contact. 

It is evident then that darkness, having eliminated 
the action of purple rays with their actinic powers, 
allows us to use our energies in your room without too 
great a neutralization. The energy we employ for all 
psychic contact with finite consciousness is greatly en- 
hanced when you neutralize purple rays through dark- 
ness and the use of various artificial coloured illumina- 
tions. I will name these in the order of their impor- 
tance : Pink, red, green, blue, yellow. 

15. Without the use of obstructing material, will it ever be 
possible in the light to make objects invisible which are 
usually under the same conditions visible? 

Ans. : Once you find a colour whose rate of vibration is 
beyond recognition by the colour-knowledge field of 
consciousness as it is controlled in the conjunction of 
the physical and spiritual life, then all objects will be- 
come invisible to you. That is exactly what invisibility 
is. There is no such thing as complete invisibility. All 
one can say is that some things at a given time are in- 
visible to some souls.* 

16. What is the value of those distinctions made between 
terms describing different stages of development such 
as psychic and spiritual, astral, pranic, manassic, the 
Twentieth Plane, etc.? 

Ans.: The value, if any, consists in their function of 
differentiating between phases of consciousness. They 
are to be accepted only in their symbolic, and not in 
their literal suggestion. To emphasize either numerical 
or name distinctions is to build unconsciously a theo- 

*When name is not given with the answer, Coleridge is the 
author. Reporter. 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 99 

logical system by which, through the use of such ter- 
minology, the cult endeavours to preserve its identity. 

17. What is the difference between psychic laws and spiritual 
laws ? 

Ans.: One might just as well ask: What is the dif- 
ference between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms. 
Of course you would say: The difference in form, ex- 
pression and organization. Yet we say the most impor- 
tant element of all these is the one basic universal sub- 
stance. So in answer to your question we say there 
is no difference between psychic and spiritual laws be- 
cause the psychic and the spiritual are principles of 
life. The most psychic thing in nature is the most 
spiritual. There is, in this larger view, no difference. 

18. Is it possible for every one who may wish it to be clair- 
voyant ? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) Every man and woman to some 
extent is clairvoyant to the consciousness of the soul. 
It is not possible for every one to be clairvoyant in 
the usual comprehension of the word which paints a 
picture from nature's page, or of a person seen clair- 
voyantly. 

19. What is the most perfect form of government? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) That is the most perfect form 
of government that inspires its citizens to do the right 
with the least compulsion. 

20. "What reliability can be attributed to mediums under 
control when so many mistakes are made in giving mes- 
sages ? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) The same reliability that can 
be attributed to any of the ministers of religion who 
make so many mistakes and go on making them, ad in- 
finitum. 



100 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

21. What is the relation between the ether of space and 
the spirit of man? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) Ordinarily, man breathes in 
the ordinary atmosphere of his world, but deep rhyth- 
mic breathing synchronizing with thought and inspira- 
tion causes man to breathe the inspiration of space 
which is a more rarefied expression of physical atmos- 
phere, and when this is done he is in contact with life 
on higher planes. 

22. Is it possible for a man who lived a very sinful life on 
this earth to come back to us after his death and tor- 
ment us? Can bad spirits return to us at all? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) There is not nearly so much 
obsession through evil spirits as most folk think. 
Rather look for the obsession of light and love, of good, 
kind, noble, angelic spirits. Do not place the respon- 
sibility on the spirits. Remember that each human 
being is a magnet, an immortal magnet, and you will (if 
you desire it) attract that noble guiding spirit who will 
uplift your life. Yes, it is possible to attract from the 
other world, as you call it, evil spirits, but it is just as 
easy to attract the good. 

23. Does everything that takes place in the physical world 
first take place in the astral world? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) Where the soul is God is. God 
has made each plane — each one of the "many man- 
sions" in the house of the Father, a particular plane 
for the originating of some grand idea, some noble 
conception which adds one factor to the glory of God 
in the great universe of His Love. 

24. Do you believe in the "supreme sacrifice"? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) I believe in the supreme sacri- 
fice if by that you mean that the humblest man in the 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 101 

universe as well as the omnipotent Ruler of the universe 
would, on occasion, because of love, take that which he 
valued most for his personal necessity and give it lov- 
ingly if it would save a brother. Yes. 

25. Does not repentance draw forgiveness without any ef- 
fort on the part of the injured? 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) That question is axiomatically 
stated. Yes. Listen! You have wronged some one. 
He refuses to forgive you. You plead in vain. Do 
not argue much with him in an intellectual way. Tune 
your life to love, include this person whom you have 
wronged. It will not be long before he will come to you, 
not asking forgiveness, but in such a way that both of 
you may explain and understand. That is the noblest 
kind of forgiveness. 

26. Why not Spiritualism? It is good as I have proved. 
The very essence of good. 

Ans.: (By Emerson.) Absolutely so, my friend, who 
asked the question. We here care not about terminol- 
ogy. Call the process of projecting my thought 
through the physical instrument on the earth plane 
what you will. Call it spiritism, call it Spiritualism — 
we care not. Neither does God. Let each individual 
express himself as well and ably as he can. 

27. How can we best acquire and develop spiritual gifts? 
Ans.: (By Emerson.) You have all the spiritual gifts 
that will enable you to be all that God desires. If you 
ask me how best to develop the spiritual gifts within 
you, I answer: have faith, love deeply and be natural. 

28. Does the artist, when he forgets time and is absorbed in 
his art, achieve completeness and become full circle? 
Ans.: (By Disraeli.) When painting, literature, sculp- 
ture, any form of artistic effort, becomes real art, then 



102 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

be sure that two artists were responsible for the work. 
One is the manual artist, the other is the inspiration of 
knowledge and beauty to which he affixed his person- 
ality so that the twain together were feminine and mas- 
culine powers that gave birth to art from nature. You 
are an artist only to the extent of your abandonment 
of intellect and your realization of the universe work- 
ing through your personality. 

29. To what extent may one trust his vision? 

Ans.: (By Disraeli.) One can trust, without hesita- 
tion, all one has or is or ever will be to the integrity of 
one's vision. No earnest and sincere man was ever 
completely mistaken. Vision is an intense illumination, 
a guide vested with divine honour, which alone you can 
trust. Vision is the momentum of truth, the light of 
explanation that your life receives when you open the 
closed doors of your experience of life. Vision is the 
key that unlocks the door of a fact. 

30. You say you do not speak to us in words, but that you 
project your thought through a physical instrument 
to us. What process changes your thought into our 
language? 

Ans.: (By Coleridge.) The process which changes our 
thought into your language is the same as that which 
changes your own thought into the expressions of your 
own language. First there is the thought; then that 
thought passes through our mind. It is relayed, first, 
through astral atmospheric air regions until it encoun- 
ters physical gaseous air regions. Then your medium, 
a sensitive magnet of attraction, gathers in our pro- 
jected thought and each thought as it is received by 
his consciousness strikes the exact musical language- 
note which becomes a word. A number of such so-re- 
ceived thoughts become sentences. These sentences, if 



QUESTION AND THE ANSWER 103 

they find the consciousness of the medium incapable of 
supplying sufficient words to express our idea, then 
cause the medium's consciousness to become en rapport 
with the reservoir of all thought and words and lan- 
guage, so that the Instrument's consciousness, provid- 
ing that conditions are equal, selects for us from every 
source the exact words and sentences to express our 
definite meaning. 



Maternity is the elan that a woman's life achieves through 
the art of her love. r .. 

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge 



THE HEART OF THE MATERNAL 

Those who have awaited the coming of the babe 
that did not arrive ; those who w T ould be mothers, but 
know that cannot be on the earth plane; those who 
have known the terror felt by the mother when her 
child enters alone into the mystery of death; to all 
of you, I speak the thought of the maternal heart. 

Mothers are as near to God as woman can ever be. 
"A little child shall lead them." They have an ex- 
perience denied to other human beings. In experi- 
encing the birth of a child, they undergo purification 
for the enlarging of their souls into the wider soul of 
the child which in turn widens till it touches other 
lives into reality. 

To women who have been denied a child, life still 
may be the reflection of the star of love. Many a 
child is born and lives in a woman's ideal, though it 
never, in a physical sense, nestles a wee head against 
mother's breast. These women idealize life, so that 
when other women become mothers, their babes live in 
a world of beauty, for woman is God's passion-flower 
in the garden of the earth. 

To those mothers who have felt baby lips on theirs, 
and little fingers feeling Mother's face, who remem- 
ber the first day at school and the education complete, 
and the babe now a man, and this man a soldier, dead ; 
there is this knowledge, consolation that nothing more 
or less than this has happened: the babe who became 
a man, a soldier, a hero, has entered into the after life 

105 



106 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

a few hours before you, and these few hours, Mothers, 
will so divinely complete your child, man, soldier, 
hero, that when you come to him he will be a full 
light, a guarding power, a guide to you along the 
eternal path that leads to God. 

Mothers, realize that you are blessed by God be- 
cause the earth depends upon you for its population. 
Mothers have said many times through the ages: 
"We have very little political power." They are for- 
getting that women are the great law-makers of the 
physical world, for they give, determine, and educate 
the citizens of every age. 

Mothers of the earth plane, you have, perhaps, the 
greatest gift of all. It is possible, and possible only 
through you, for a soul, an individual ego, to secure 
out of your body a physical body in which to live. 
The Divine has made you so that He can find a physi- 
cal home for a soul to live in, only from you, mothers 
of the earth plane. 

Mothers of the earth plane, if you were here in 
this heaven world, had, before you passed to this 
plane, been the mother of several children, and found 
an opportunity as I find it now, of telling two or three 
of the most important things for the welfare of 
mothers, what would you say? I do not know, but 
some day you will be here, as I am now. You may 
find an opportunity to speak to mothers, and among 
the things you will say, will be these, I am sure : 

Mothers, realize that what your baby is was de- 
termined by you when you were in your girlhood. 
Some think that the genius of a man comes to him 



HEART OF THE MATERNAL 107 

when he is physically born. They do not know that 
genius came oftentimes when the mother in her girl- 
hood had an experience and felt life's deep nature. 
The birth of a great soul in the physical sometimes 
dates back to the tender years of the youth of the 
mother. 

Mothers on the earth plane, you have two im- 
portant duties to perform: first, to be the maternal 
university your children attend ; second, to teach your 
daughters, the potential mothers, to seek to under- 
stand this experience. Students of the human mind 
on the earth plane speak of the mother instinct. I 
do not like that term. It is wrong. This is not an 
instinct: it is a natural, lovingly-directed use of the 
power of maternity. There is nothing automatic 
about it. It should be called mother-love. It is the 
desire of every girl to be, some day, one who will hold 
in her arms part of her own body containing a soul 
to love. How little girls love to play with dolls, the 
representations of mothers who will some day hold in 
their arms a child of their own both to love and to 
play with. The mother who does not play with her 
children does not deserve them. But do not make the 
mistake of thinking that when little girls hold dolls 
in their arms, this is merely an instinct. It should 
be given another name. Call it the birth-ideal, for 
the desire to be a mother is the uniting of body, brain, 
soul, intuition, and all divine and human knowledge, 
as a girl realizes knowledge, when her life urges her 
to be a mother. 

I have said that the genius of a child is born dur- 
ing the girlhood of the mother, through a certain ex- 



108 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

perience. That experience takes place when the girl 
enjoys all life speaking to her soul, and this has never 
been in the experience of any girl a silent, inaudible 
voice. When that voice spoke, though, many girls 
hardly listened. A few were all-intent. They be- 
came the mothers of great men and women. When 
life speaks to the girl, telling her that some day she 
may be a mother, then should all society surround 
that girl and contribute the teaching of maternal 
preparation. These things should be taught to the 
coming mothers of the human race. 

The body of the baby is born from and is a part 
of the mother's physical life. The soul is born from 
the universe. The soul that comes to the particular 
physical body comes nearly always on the invitation 
of the quality of that body. 

Teach your daughters all that you know of the 
laws of motherhood. Teach them that exercise, 
health, thought, purity, are religious duties, and 
should be attended to as one attends to prayer. 

Teach that a mother, when she was once a girl, be- 
came radically different from man, because she, as 
perhaps one of the highest duties of her life, had al- 
ready commenced to live these lives, one of her child 
to be, and one of herself. 

Teach the power of desire. Tell every girl that if 
she commences life's duty in early years, she can place 
herself directly in contact with a soul that, though 
her babe is still unborn, will find a home in her baby 
when she gives it a body. 

Be impressed by the deep important duty of a 



HEART OF THE MATERNAL 109 

woman's life — to prepare the coming race of mothers, 
and to teach the race that already has arrived. 

We cannot know what maternity means till we 
study the nature of woman. No matter what the 
earth plane may require of women in labor and 
government they will still retain those noble char- 
acteristics which belong to woman. The construction 
of a woman's body is more delicate and tender than 
that of a man. She is a sensitive and responsive soul, 
easily impressed by love and as deeply influenced by 
its absence. Through the use of intuition, vision, 
patience, hope and faith, God has attuned her to in- 
spiration more finely than man. 

I do not know whether nature has been more care- 
ful in her work with women than with men, but 
usually both the soul and the body of women are more 
beautiful than those of men. I do not say that na- 
ture has made woman greater than man. I am 
speaking of fineness, beauty, sensitiveness, finish. 
Sometimes I think that women are the branches and 
leaves of the tree, and men the great strong trunk, in 
their place and for the purpose of their being, equal 
in their importance, each great, but reaching to the 
same height up different sides of an arching moun- 
tain. 

Woman is a flame, an intensity, a passion. She 
has schooled herself through discipline to resemble 
men in physical and mental attitude towards common 
objects, but the lioness has a far more intense and 
fiery disposition than the lion. Woman combines 
deep, passionate vital forces, which in a supreme crisis 



110 BIRTH THEOUGH DEATH 

can command, through the power of reproduction, 
certain energies in the universe. Such energies so 
combined have become you who now read my words. 

Daughters of the earth plane, ask yourselves this 
question many times: Is my life as a woman to be 
mere accident, haphazard and chance, or shall I direct 
it? Because I have deeper emotion and feeling than 
most men, I can, if I consider the object important 
enough, become a martyr, know what hell is and smile. 
By the divine power, I — the only chamber of being 
through which, by opening the door of purity and 
idealism, a soul can enter, then open another door and 
walk out, a boy or a girl — I will bend my high in- 
tensity into the channel where flows the love of God. 

We advance a step. Sex impulse is based on 
love. The heart of the maternal has this motif of 
music singing always a twilight lullaby, a poem, a 
thought whose burden is: God made me a woman 
to be loved. I only receive love when I give love. 
My love is but a half circle of gold waiting to meet 
another half circle of gold, waiting for the time when 
the two shall melt through passion together and be- 
come an encircling source of strength. Love is the 
perfume that the peace of silence detects in every 
storm. 

Women of the earth plane, those of you who are 
mothers, and those of you who are not, history records 
that most of the worthy achievements of men have 
been inspired by women. I fear that, unless the 
present generation of women on the earth plane, en- 
joying all that man can know, still retain their 
feminine qualities, they will become a race of Spartan 



HEA&T OF THE MATERNAL 111 

mothers ; and Sparta, with all her glory, did not en- 
dure. What then must be done by the women of the 
earth plane to preserve their womanly qualities, and, 
above all, the soul of the maternal? 

Women should develop their beauty. Do not tell 
me this cannot be done if the physical body does not 
possess it. The true man loves the beauty that he 
sees expressed through the eyes of a woman when he 
becomes aware, and this is love, of the character of 
her soul. There are no ugly women. There are only 
ugly bodies. The woman is her soul, and there is no 
woman so utterly depraved, with rare exceptions, that 
she cannot be developed into beauty through desire. 

Women of the earth plane, those of you who expect 
to become mothers, do not suppress yourselves. 
Laugh; be free; live much in the open. Cultivate 
grace of speech and carriage. Give full play to the 
sensitive, responsive, wave-like motion of your soul, 
as it demands a liberal life of beauty in a free but 
sensible world. When a woman has become a 
mother, forever then she has a sympathy with every 
other woman, a sympathy which only mothers know, 
and which she has because she is a mother. In that 
direction, she has fulfilled, in the physical world, all 
that was expected of her. God knew the suffering 
that mothers must inevitably pass through, so in com- 
pensation He gave to them this precious jewel — the 
material to employ for the making of a human being, 
thus making them creators. 

Every woman who ever lived had a mother, but not 
every woman became a mother. Has God forgotten 
the noble women who are not and never will be 



112 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

mothers? Sometimes I used to think so when on the 
earth plane I met the woman who was not a mother, 
but now I understand. The woman who is not a 
mother should spend much time with children. She 
should recognize that every woman has a duty 
towards all children, both the born and the unborn. 
The divine faculty of maternity was never utterly 
suppressed in any woman, though she never gave 
birth to children in the physical sense. 

Before children are born they are collected. Who 
collects them? Who brings together the particles of 
their being? It is principally in this that the child is 
born. Other women, all the time, assist the mother, 
in an important sense, before the birth of her child. 
It is necessary for the woman who does not become 
a mother, in so far as she can, to share the maternal 
experience of one who will be a mother; for, as I 
have told you, maternity is never totally suppressed 
in any woman. If you saw from our world what 
happens when the body of the unborn child is as- 
sembled and grows, you would observe that the 
mother with her life is reaching out in a thousand 
directions and collecting those elements out of which 
her child will be made. These particles are brought 
to the mother both through the human mind and 
physical body channels. Only another woman than 
the mother, through the maternal force in her being, 
can assist the mother to draw physical and psychic 
elements that, passing through maternity, become hu- 
man beings. 

So, women of the earth plane who are called the 
ones who will not be mothers, realize that next to be- 



HEART OF THE MATERNAL 113 

ing a mother is the divine privilege you have of as- 
sisting, through prenatal influences, in the formation 
of another woman's child. This is true of the body. 
It is a million times more true of the mind, and of the 
soul that will come to the child. Experience teaches 
that when a child becomes a man or a woman of 
genius and greatness, and you cannot attribute this 
to inheritance, ofttimes that child is born through the 
effort of some noble woman who loved the mother, 
more than through the plrysical door it used to enter 
the world. This seems to be God's compensation to 
the barren woman, who, though barren, entered into 
the heart of the experience of maternity that another 
woman had through her maternal desire which was 
her love. Friendship sometimes gives genius to the 
child of a friend you love. 

Mothers, learn to know when your work is done. 
Realize that when your children have reached the age 
when they can take those they love and add to the 
citizenship of the world, all your work is done, except 
to love your children forever. Having done all that 
is possible for your child, if he disappoints you — 
causes you pain — remember that your work is done, 
and the responsibility lies now with the child. Moth- 
ers love their children so much that they blame them- 
selves for a thousand things for which they have no 
responsibility. Do not do it, mothers. Have faith 
to know that there is a God who is both Mother and 
Father; that the Mother part of Him made all His 
children, including you, and that the Father in Him 
will some day, somehow, allow you to see in your child 
your highest ideal realized in most perfect form. 



114 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

You ask me how I know. The heart of the Maternal 
told me so, and it must be true, because that Heart 
from which was born a child can never be a false 
witness. Let us all then dwell in the sunlight of the 
greatest Mother Heart of all — the Love of God. 

The Woman Soul 

Because all the earth is torn asunder by problems 
which, while in process of solution, distress mankind, 
woman with her deep feeling has despaired and felt 
lonely for, even in normal times, she is, in one phase 
of her life, greatly misunderstood, and in abnormal 
times she is greatly neglected. Speaking as a woman 
who lived on the earth plane, loved, was loved, reared 
children and ascended to this higher plane, I cannot 
but feel that if the people of the earth understood 
their women better, the joy of the earth plane would 
be enhanced. 

I say to the women of the earth plane that, no 
matter how much they are satisfied with life, how 
serene their domestic situation, how they are loved, 
have children that love them, friends who understand 
them; though in every way life seems to be worth 
while; yet all agree with me when I say that every 
woman on earth, regardless of her situation, has an 
indefinable yet vivid sense of regret within her soul. 
A great artist on the Twentieth Plane once said 
within my hearing, "There never was a beautiful 
woman who did not have some form of tragedy in 
her eyes." The purpose of this little essay is to find 
out what the regret is that burns in a woman's soul; 
whether it can be eradicated, and how. 



HEART OF THE MATERNAL 115 

The women of the earth plane are all hero-wor- 
shipers. The regret in their souls has been due to the 
inequity of your political and economic systems. 
Heroism has been almost stifled. Women are great 
when they inspire men. All great men have been 
inspired by women. All the complexities of modern 
civilization became intenser, the struggle for exist- 
ence keener, and a small minority — an aristocracy of 
wealth, with reins of gold — held the people in bond- 
age. Then women uncomplainingly despaired be- 
cause they found men becoming machines, and women 
as hero-worshipers could not worship a machine. 

The woman who was a mother, knowing this, de- 
spaired because she realized that her children would 
become part of the great machine of slaving human- 
ity. Women have that indefinable regret in their 
souls because ignorance, disease, prudery, mock- 
modesty, lust, sin — all these were the manipulating 
forces which made the only companion the woman 
could have in her life. These led her into situations 
where she was forced uncomplainingly to have her 
body polluted, her soul darkened, and all this in a 
world which called itself "Christian." 

There have been more martvrs among women than 
among men. There are some things in a woman's 
life that she will never surrender. The foremost is 
her right to be a woman. This carries with it the 
insistence on a righteous world in which her children, 
her lover-husband, and herself can be protected by 
religion, education and democracy. This indefinable 
regret found in every woman's soul is there because, 
no matter how pure her life and that of her husband- 



116 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lover, the world in which she lived and he existed 
made it almost impossible for her to be a heroine and 
him a hero. 

The vice of an age stamps out individuality. 
Through all the years of a woman's life her individ- 
uality and that of the one she loves becomes a com- 
mon type without a personality ; then the oppression, 
the slow disintegration, gives birth to that regret 
which is still found in the soul of the happiest woman 
on the earth plane. 

The outlook is bright. Your age, by calling women 
to the service of the state, and by that rebirth which 
all the peoples of the earth plane have experienced, 
is achieving the preservation of womanhood. As if 
a world-wide storm had uprooted and cast out all 
fear, you are passing from the blight of degenerate 
centuries into an epoch when the development of in- 
dividuality and personality through all the educative 
processes of the state has become with you almost a 
religion. With the coming of this epoch, that inde- 
finable regret within a woman's soul will slowly dis- 
appear, and soon every woman will be a heroine and 
every man a hero. 

— Mary Youle Watson. 



He who tells a story that a little child can understand is 
greater than one who writes for the geniuses of his time. 

— Hartley Coleridge 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 

In the autumn of nineteen nineteen, it was inti- 
mated by Hartley Coleridge that if we would invite 
some children to a circle meeting, one of the children 
of the Twentieth Plane would speak to them, and he 
himself would tell them some stories. The proposed 
party was held at the home of the Benjamins on 
December seventh. Seven children and seven adults 
were in attendance. The proceedings, in part, are 
as follows: 

Mary Youle Watson: 

"Boys and girls, there is a little difference between 
our world and yours. There is lots and lots of air 
between my world and your world. But my world 
is real, and your world is real. Perhaps you will 
wonder how it is that I can talk to you and yet not 
be with you. Well, this is the way I do it : You have 
the telephone in your world. Maybe you have never 
seen the person you speak to, with the eyes you wink 
with, and perhaps you will never see or touch them, 
yet you know someone is there, and you are talking 
to them. Perhaps you will never see me in a body, 
but there is a kind of telephone between my world 
and your world, and I am talking through that tele- 
phone. It has no wires. Have you anything in 
your world through which you can send messages 
without wires?" 

119 



120 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Harry: "The wireless telegraph." 

"Yes. Well, this is a sort of wireless telegraph. 
I am speaking into a telephone, and my thought goes 
in a wireless way to Mr. Benjamin, and he hears me 
and speaks to you. 

"I want to tell you a little about love. This is what 
love means to the children on the Twentieth Plane. 
If you say to yourself, 'I want to be good so that my 
mother or my father will think I am a fine boy,' if 
you say to yourself, 'I want to be a fine boy so that at 
Christmas time Santa Glaus will bring me a present,' 
if you say to yourself, 'I am going to be good so that 
my mother will think I am the best boy she ever saw, 
the best girl she ever heard about,' well, that is not 
love. Trying to be your best so that you will get 
something — that is not love. 

"A little girl came to me the other day. Her name 
was Clara. She said to me : 'You know, I have never 
seen my mother.' And I said: 

" 'Yes, Clara, I know you have never seen her.' 

"She said: 'Still I love her.' 

"I said: 'How do you know you ever had a 
mother?' 

" 'Oh,' the little girl replied, 'they have told me all 
about my mother and they have shown me something 
which shows me what my mother was like.' Then she 
said : 'Mary (the children in this world call me Mary) , 
I love my mother.' 

" 'What do you mean by loving your mother?' 

" 'Well, when I think, mother is in my thoughts.' 

"That is love, children; when you think and father 
or mother is in your thoughts, that is love. In that 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 121 

which you think, you find what you love. . . . When 
you want to love your father or mother, do not want 
anything for yourselves. Do not think about your- 
selves at all. Loving others is to think about them 
and forget yourselves. I will love the fragrant 
young heart — the star soul of children. 

"Children, a little girl is going to speak to you 
now. Her name is Eva Talk to her and have a 
good time. She is happy that she has been chosen 
a kind of queen for this May occasion. She is here 
with her love, so good-bye for a little while." 

Eva: 

"Dear people and boys and girls: They told me 
there would be a children's party on the earth plane 
and that I could come and speak to you, and I said: 
'Shall I memorize a piece?' and they said: 'Oh, no. 
The boys and girls on the earth plane just want you 
to speak to them and tell them about your school.' 
So would you like to hear a little girl of this life tell 
about the school she goes to on the Twentieth Plane?" 

"Yes." (From several.) 

'Well, we get up, here, quite early in the morn- 
ing. My mother says it would be about seven o'clock 
in your world. Do you know the first thing we do? 
We go outside our house — it has not a door or win- 
dow, but it has openings where there are doors and 
windows in your houses. There is in the sky some- 
thing like what you call the sun. Well, it serves the 
same purpose. It gives us heat and light. We call 
it, for the children, the preparation- star. We see the 
preparation-star and feel as if God reached a beau- 



122 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

tiful arm from the sky, and His fingers move all 
over our faces, and when His fingers reach our bosom, 
we breathe deeply and we feel strong and clean. You 
do the same thing in your world with water. We 
cleanse ourselves for the day by facing the prepara- 
tion-star, 

"Then we go to a great, beautiful field. We have 
not, in this world, winter-time like you have. So we 
do not have to wear so many clothes as you do. But 
we do wear white clothes and blue dresses and pink 
gowns. We go to a place in the woods where the 
grass is long, and about eight hundred children sit 
in a circle with our teacher in the centre, and we can 
hear the flowers talk to us, and birds come and speak 
to us, and the trees speak to us, and we look at the 
sky, and the sky tells us something. 

"You learn your lessons from a blackboard. We 
learn from a skyboard. We learn our lessons from 
all the world, and that is as it should be, and will 
be, in your world. We have only one teacher for 
all the class, from the youngest child to the very old- 
est. Well, we go to that kind of a school for about 
three hours as you would know it by your clocks, and 
then we come home and rest. Do you know how we 
rest? We find some boy or girl who cannot under- 
stand something. We know that two people together 
can understand much better than one alone. But my 
teacher says we are never alone. She sa} 7 s that the 
love that is in you will be seen by you in everybody 
and in everything else. She says the way to have 
beautiful things said to you is to think beautiful 
things about others. Our teacher says that when one 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 123 

person meets another, he must look into his eyes and 
become quiet and think, 'I am a little child, and I 
am before one whom God has made, and so I am 
in the presence of God.' Then a beautiful feeling 
will come over you, and first *thing you know that 
person begins to say the most wonderful things to 
you. 

"Now, boys and girls, ask me any question and 
I will try to answer you." 

"Do you learn lessons as we do?" one of the girls 
(Lorna) asked. 

"We learn lessons about conduct, religion, art and 
life. We do not learn much about arithmetic and 
languages. Those are things that you must learn in 
your world." 

"When you learn art do you make drawings of the 
things you see about you?" 

"Yes, we can make drawings so that all the other 
children and the teacher can see them. We do not 
make them on paper. We learn here that everything 
is thought, and it really is. Before the artist in your 
world can paint a beautiful picture, a picture much 
more beautiful is in his soul. Even in this world, we 
never can express all that we think about the things of 
art. 

"Remember that a little girl of the Twentieth 
Plane named Eva spoke to you. Some day some of 
you may meet me, and when you do, I will take you 
into my own flower garden. Flowers have souls, and 
know what it is to love. I will teach you the name of 
each flower, and you will learn to love them as I do. 
I will show you some dogs and horses and pigeons. 



124 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

There will be many things to tell you about, which I 
cannot tell you about now because I cannot speak as 
well as the grown people." 

Hartley Coleridge: 

"Thev have asked me to come and tell the children 
a story or two. The first story I will relate is a fairy 
tale. 

Dimpity Jumbo 

"The hero of our story, boys and girls, was named 
Dimpity Jumbo. Dimpity lived in a world like your 
own. His father had a cart and used to go out and 
sell vegetables. Dimpity had eight brothers. His 
mother had to work hard and not one of them was 
neglected. They had plenty to eat and to wear, and 
their home was very enjoyable. 

"His father and mother used to say: C I can under- 
stand all the children but that boy Dimpity.' His 
mother would complain : 'If I send Dimpity around 
the corner to buy something for me, I never know 
when he will come home. If I send him to school, I 
never know whether he will reach school or not.' 
Dimpity Jumbo was a fat boy and, my, how he did 
love to sleep! 

"Once he was sent to school, and the school did not 
hear of him, and neither did his father and mother for 
three days. Do you know what he did? He went 
out into the country and lay down in a field and went 
to sleep, and we shall never know whether he slept 
for the whole three days and nights or not, but he 
was found fast asleep. A little bird was right on 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 125 

his face, and even that had not wakened him. 

"A farmer came along and saw the boy and the 
bird. He went up to Dimpity. The bird flew away. 
He took Dimpity by the shoulder and shook him, at 
first wondering if he were not his neighbour's scare- 
crow. He felt him again and saw that he was real, 
so he shook Dimpity some more, and after a long time 
and very hard work, he got him wakened. Dimpity 
rubbed his eyes hard and did not say a word. Then 
he searched his clothes, but could not find one thing 
that would show where he lived, so he took Dimpity 
Jumbo home with him. 

"This farmer was rather a strict man. After Dim- 
pity had finished his supper, the farmer said to him: 

" 'I will not have anyone around my place that 
does not work,' and he looked at him as fiercely as if 
he would eat him up. He looked far fiercer than the 
giant in 'Jack and the Beanstalk.' The farmer said: 
'It has taken me three hours to get you to tell me 
your name, and where you live; you've had your sup- 
per and have put me to a lot of trouble, so you will 
have to saw wood for three hours more.' 

"So Dimpity Jumbo was taken out into the yard 
where there were piles and piles of the hardest kind 
of wood cut out of an oak tree, and you know how 
hard that is. But Dimpity had to saw, for he was 
really frightened. But he thought, 'This farmer had 
to bring me here in his wagon, and I think I ought to 
repay him.' So he worked just as hard as he could 
till he had made a big pile. His muscles were tired 
and his head ached, and he wished he was home. 

"After he had worked for three hours, he went to 



126 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the farmer and said: 'I have done my work. I am 
awfully sorry I have caused you any trouble.' The 
farmer said: 'You are a good boy. You are made 
of the right stuff. You have pluck.' Then Dimpity 
Jumbo said : 'I would like to go home to my father 
and mother.' The farmer said: 'All right.' So 
they hitched up the horses. Dimpity was so fat he 
could hardly reach up to help hitch up. 

"Then Dimpity thought, 'Will father punish me 
for being away so long? If I can make friends with 
the farmer all will be well.' So Dimpity Jumbo said : 
'Mister, I am afraid when I go home they will give 
me an awful whipping. But I'm not so much afraid 
of that as I am of seeing my mother cry.' I knew a 
lot about this for I used to get a caning when I was a 
boy. They call it caning in England because they 
have a cane and they give you a smart crack with it. 
Then you dance around and feel pretty badly for a 
moment or two, but English boys bite their lips so as 
not to cry. That is the way we all should bear pain. 

"The farmer said : 'When you get home I will tell 
your father and mother the truth. You worked for 
me. I found you resting. You had a fine rest and 
you worked for me. Leave it to me.' Dimpity 
Jumbo thought that sounded all right, but he was 
rather shaky. The farmer helped Dimpity down. 
Just as Dimpity thought, his mother was crying and 
his father had a worried look. So then Dimpity be- 
gan to cry too. His little brothers and sisters came 
around asking questions so fast he could not possibly 
answer any of them. 

"Then the farmer said: 'Mr. Jumbo, your boy 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 127 

has learned to work.' The father said: 'Well, he 
never worked before.' The farmer replied: 'He 
has learned how to saw wood, and to think of his 
father and mother/ 

"So Dimpity Jumbo thought for a long time what 
he could do for his father and mother. He cut the 
wood and carried water for his mother, and this was 
the turning-point in Dimpity Jumbo's life. As soon 
as he began to think of other people, and do things 
for them, people began to say: 'Dimpity is a real 
little man. He isn't like the old Dimpity Jumbo at 
all.' And sure enough, he had become a man. So 
this is the story of Dimpity Jumbo and his long sleep. 

The Phantom Canoe 

"This will be a true story. Once I went to the 
shore of a lake here and lay down on the sand. As 
the waves moved along the shore, one could hear 
music. To be alone near a beautiful lake or in the 
woods makes us grow strong. It is the same in your 
world. Be often alone so that thoughts may come to 
you that you do not think. The thoughts you do not 
think are much more valuable to you than those you 
think through will power or determination. The 
thoughts that come to you that you do not think are 
the thoughts of inspiration. 

"I was lying on the shore listening to the music of 
the lake, and was alone. I looked out over the lake 
and saw a little boat — something like a canoe, only 
this had sails of pure white, outstretched like the 
wings of an eagle. The boat moved over the waves 
and came towards me, and as I looked at this wonder- 



128 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

? ' 

fill boat with the eagle wjngs outspread, a little girl 
stepped out, then the boat vanished and was seen no 
more. 

"I did not recognize the little girl. Here, we know 
instantly whether one belongs to this world or not, 
and I knew that she had just come. Her eyes were 
beautiful, of a brown color. Her name was Helen. 
She said to me : 'I have come to visit this great world 
because I am trying to find my mother.' 

"I said to her, 'Why do you want to find your 
mother?' 

"I knew that she could find her mother all right, 
but I wondered why Helen wanted to find her 
mother. She said: 'Hartley, the only reason I 
want to meet my mother is so that she can send mes- 
sages of love back to my brothers who are on the 
earth plane.' I wanted to find out if Helen wanted 
to meet her mother, to see her for herself. So I said: 
'I will do that for you. I will send a person who will 
meet your mother, and she will send back to your 
brothers on the earth plane a message so that they 
will not feel lonesome.' 

"Helen came to me and put her arms around my 
neck and kissed me. I thought there would be tears 
in her eyes, but there were none. Then she said: 
'Oh, I am so frightened. My boat is gone! I 
thought to drift back in it to the other world.' I 
said: 'Helen, you are so beautiful that probably you 
do not belong here. I fear the children even of this 
plane might find you too frail, too delicate a glory 
flower to dwell among them.' All she did was to 
look at me and smile, so I took this great child by the 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 129 

hand and walked in silence along the path of medita- 
tion. How long we walked I do not know. . Helen 
will never know. It may have been for days, but 
there canle between us a kind of understanding, and 
I found that some of the strength of my own nature 
seemed to leave me and go to Helen, so that when we 
reached the mother-group home, the child was not 
quite so frail, and I said: 

" 'Mary, I have brought you from the open arms 
of the sea an angel-child of love.' 

"And Mary kissed Helen, who seemed to find her- 
self at home amongst us. She is still with us. She 
has seen her mother, though she never once asked to 
see her. Helen has learned, because she knows some- 
thing of the religion of this plane, that her brothers 
will some dav meet her and her mother, and that the 
only suffering they will ever endure will be the suffer- 
ing they bring on themselves. No matter how long 
they live, some day their own mother will meet them, 
and all their suffering will be as a mist which the wind 
shall blow away, and all shall be right in the eyes of 
God forever. 

"This is the true story of Helen who came to this 
plane on the ship that had the eagle wings. 

"I want to tell you something important: There 
is a way you can say a thing so that none will believe 
you, and there is a way to say it so that one would in- 
stantly know that you had spoken the very soul of 
truth. When another comes to you, as if I came to 
Gladys or Myra or Harry or Dorothy or Gordon or 
Grace or any of the boys or girls, and says, *I will 
write a letter and leave it on the table in this room. 



130 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Will you put that letter in the pillar-box?' if you 
say to me in a low voice, and do it without effort, 'Yes, 
Hartley, I will post the letter,' then I will know that 
you are speaking the truth. But if I ask you to do 
something for me and you speak in a loud voice and 
ask me a question — if this time or the other time will 
not do, then I am doubtful whether you will post the 
letter for me or not. The way you say a thing shows 
what is back of the thing said. Truth never speaks 
in a loud voice. Truth never asks a question. 
Truth is either negative or positive, never vague. 
Truth has a way of guaranteeing that the truth 
uttered is all the truth. 

"Now I will tell you a fairy tale. 

Good Nature 

"& very great man came to us not long ago. IB 
you met him, boys and girls, you would say he was 
Santa Claus. The only difference was that he was ' 
much taller than Santa Claus. But he had a long 
white beard and little small rolling eyes and a round 
face. He just looked like a ball with two ears and 
two eyes stuck on the ball. I do not know that there 
was a chin. I said to him : 

" 'My friend, I am glad to meet you.' He said: 
"'I am glad to meet you also, Hartley. But I 
have come here to teach people what there is to learn 
about the giving of gifts.' I said: 

" 'We will be glad to know about that/ 
" 'Well,' he said, 'have all your friends to-night 
gather around me.' 

"So all the mother group and many others formed 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 131 

around this wonderful man. Do you know what 
made his face so perfectly round that you could not 
tell the chin from the forehead? Why, it is because 
he laughs so much. He was always laughing when 
he was not thinking thoughts to us. There are some 
people who enjoy feeling badly. If you hurt their 
feelings they have a much better time than if you .do 
not. Well, this was just the opposite sort of person. 
So all the friends I could get to come gathered around 
and formed a circle. He sat in the centre of the circle 
and said : 

" T have a surprise for you. It is far more impor- 
tant to know how to receive a gift than to know how 
to give it. Giving a gift is something anyone can 
do, but there are very few people who know how to 
receive one.' 

"Listen! Santa Claus is coming to all the boys 
and girls soon. I mean the same kind of Santa Claus 
that I am speaking about now— part of him true and 
part of him not true. Some people tell children, 
when they get to be a little older than Grace, that 
there is no Santa Claus, but do not believe them. 
There is a wonderful Santa Claus, but I must go on 
with my story. Well, the wonderful man with, the 
two ears stuck on the round ball, and always laughing 
— we will call him Good Nature — said : 

" 'Anyone can give gifts, but it is hard to know 
just how to receive them.' 

"Most people can get possession of something. 
You can go out and make a snowball, and give it to 
another boy. That is easy. But how will the other 
boy receive and appreciate what you give him? I 



132 BIRTH THROUGH DEAtH 

am telling you this so that at Christmas when Santa 
Claus comes to you with gifts, you will remember that 
it is very important to know how to receive them. 

"I will tell you how to receive gifts. First of all 
you naturally look at the thing given to you. Then 
you want to know who gave you the gift. At Christ- 
mas time you will say: 'Yes, I know what this is — 
it is a plaything. I am going to have a good time/ 
That is wise. Then you will say, 'Who gave me this?* 
And you will say, 'Santa Claus.' Then you will 
think about him for a second or two. Then you will 
forget him and play with your gift. Then you will 
think a great deal about yourself and the gift. Let 
me tell you this. Always remember when gifts come' 
to you, they came because of somebody's love. Santa 
Claus in no age ever brought a gift to a child except 
through the love of some human being. 

"This man, Good Nature, taught me that to know 
how to receive a gift is far more important than to 
know how to give one. The way to receive a gift is 
this: realize that through love, which means someone 
else thinking about you, the gift came to you. Re- 
member that the person who sent you the gift sent 
you something else, gave you something of himself. 
Everything you touch has some part of yourself go 
all around the thing touched. You cannot see it, but 
it is there, and there are some people in your world 
who can see, they can take the thing you touched, 
hold it in their hands — they have never met you, and 
perhaps never will meet you, yet they can tell what 
kind of person you are, simply by touching the thing 
you handled. So the way to receive a gift is to hold 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 133 

it in your hand* first, and know that it came to you 
through love — to. know that a part of the person who 
sent it is in the gift and will be in it forever. 

"I could tell you many other things that Good 
Nature told me, but my hope is that when you waken 
up on Christmas morning and find beautiful things 
around you, you will remember that they were made 
by people and that part of the people who made the 
things is in them, and think, 'I. must look upon every 
gift as sacred.' 

"I must tell you there is a real Santa Claus. He is 
born out of the thought and love of humanity. He 
sends out thought desires in thought waves, so that 
once a year the great divine Master, Jesus, uniting 
his thought with these desires, can come into the lives 
of little children and make Christmas and the gifts of 
Christmas great events in their lives. 

"Now, boys and girls, I will tell you another story, 
and I want you to help me by taking part in it." 

Here Hartley ascertained what kind of a story the 
children would like, and they decided that it was to 
be a story about Christmas on the Twentieth Plane 
and about two children, Eleanor and Arthur. 

The Christmas Tree 

"Boys and girls, Eleanor and Arthur once came to 
visit my father. He is a great lover of children and 
they know him very well. He loves children to call 
him by his first name, so they said, * Samuel, we want 
to have a Christmas tree such as the children on the 



134 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

earth plane have.' So my father said, 'All right, 
we will do that.' 

"So when Christmas eve came along, the time you 
have it on the earth plane, Samuel took them into the 
big room where he studies and said : 'I am going to 
change this into an earth plane room.' Then he went 
over to the wall and pressed a button, and there was 
glass in the windows of our room, and there was a 
door, and it was closed. And the boy and girl looked 
out through the windows and it was snowing — big 
white flakes of snow. The moon was in the sky, and 
we knew it was very cold outside because we could 
see the breath that others were breathing out as they 
walked by, and we heard sleigh bells, and a group of 
people came in front of the window and sang Christ- 
mas carols. 

"Then Eleanor and Arthur turned and saw some- 
thing standing so high it reached the ceiling, and on 
it were candles and bells and stockings and presents, 
and it was one of the most beautiful sights you ever 
saw. What do you think it was?" 

"A Christmas tree!" 

"Yes, a Christmas tree right here on the Twentieth 
Plane. Then my father said: 'There are candles on 
the tree and they are burning and you do not under- 
stand such things, so do not knock them over or the 
tree will catch fire.' 

"Eleanor and Arthur promised that they would be 
as careful as they could. But they were not used to 
such things, and they were not very long at the pres- 
ents on the tree when Arthur accidentally knocked 
one of the candles over and it set the tree on fire. 



THE CHILDREN'S PARTY 135 

You should have heard the children scream and seen 
the big people come rushing around, 

"We have no fire department here, so what do you 
think we did? We said to my father: 'Press the 
other button!' 

"He pressed the other button, and suddenly there 
was no door, no window, and no Christmas tree, and 
the children began to cry. And my father said: 
'Children, what shall we do? If we bring the tree 
back, it will be burning, and that would be dreadful.' 

" 'Well,' he said, 'there is another button on the 
other side of the room. Try that.' 

"We were scared all this time because of the ex- 
citement. I was trembling. My father looked 
worried. Eleanor and Arthur had their arms around 
each other. And what do you think happened when 
we touched the third button?" 

"I do not know." 

"When they touched the third button, nothing hap- 
pened, and that made matters worse. I said, 'There 
is a fourth button.' But my father said, 'You leave 
buttons alone, my son. You are getting me into all 
sorts of difficulty with these children.' But I thought 
things could not be, worse, so I said a prayer for 
protection and took a long breath, I looked for a 
way of escape if anything happened, then went over 
and pressed the fourth button and out came the 
Christmas tree and the fire was out, and the candles 
were all burning, and the winter was outside, and we 
could hear the carols. 

"Then Eleanor took one of the little horses from 
the Christmas tree and handed it to Arthur and said, 



136 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

'Here is a Christmas gift for you.' And Arthur took 
off a doll and handed it to Eleanor and said, 'Here is 
one for you.' So they exchanged gifts of love and 
were satisfied. 

"We did not have to touch any more buttons. All 
that happened was this, Eleanor waked up and 
rubbed her eyes, Arthur rubbed his, then they both 
agreed that it was only a dream. Perhaps it was. 
Some of the most wonderful things in our lives seem 
to us only dreams. But there are no dreams. At 
any rate your dreams are real. The beauty of a 
dream is nature's way of educating your imagina- 
tion." 



Man is the method by which the divine comprehends him- 
self. 

— Drummond 



THE FOCUSING OF GODS PERSON- 
ALITY THROUGH MAN 

Compiled by Henry Deummond and Dictated by 
Ralph Waldo Emeeson 

All the universe, in one stupendous moment, 
gathered all her forces and made you. Each individ- 
ual necessitated, when energy fused and a soul was 
born, a contribution from all the planes, so that from 
a trillion channels flowed, into one definite entity, a 
combination of all universal substances, which so 
gathered, became you, my brother, my sister. This 
was so of your physical body — the material world in 
which you live. It was so of your mental life. 
Supremely was it so of your present consciousness 
which is now comprehending the thought of my con- 
sciousness, as the vision of your soul reads the path- 
way of my thought along life's highway. 

Experience continually emphasizes to the members 
of the Mother Group that man is made in the image 
of his Creator. It is the object of this chapter to tell 
you why. But the telling of a message of this nature 
will elude you unless you, with soul alertness, live 
with us the sacred import of such a theme. 

Man, above all else, is a universal duality individ- 
ualized in the most general expression of his being. 
He is dual along two deeply delved depths: The 
first portion of his duality is that he is made in the 

139 



140 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

image of his Creator, because man is a direct product 
of all creation, and in physical man is found actual 
and representative portions of all finite and infinite 
substances of every plane. The second phase of his 
duality is that man is the method by which the Divine 
comprehends Himself,, through the loving growth of 
His ever-living children. Summarized, this means 
that man, in the dual agency of his representation of 
Deity, is made of the same substance of which Deity 
is composed, so that Deity may find in man a method 
by which both add glory to that Eternal Magnifi- 
cence, the vision of beauty breathing through all that 
is, and using as a respiratory breath, wisdom at the 
point of her highest contact. 

The more dual a man is, as so far described, the 
more individualized he becomes. For in the second 
portion of his duality, man, as a method, teaches that 
such duality is a form of infinite concentration of 
divine elements and method organized into an entity 
which, my brother, is yourself. 

Now, Friend, I have been speaking through the 
thought of a higher plane. I will meet you in the 
home of your own sphere, and lovingly we will con- 
template that which a great philosopher said was the 
most important study of all. (Man, know thyself.) 
You say my thought is mystical, the vague and un- 
practical dream of a visionary. Your intellectual 
age demands, as your business men say, solid facts, 
concrete things, data spread out on the level of a 
jury's mind. Very well; so be it. I am your 
brother. You are mine, and, said the light to the 
shadow, "My brother, let us climb." We have 



GOD'S PERSONALITY 141 

reached then the first position of soul-unfoldment 
consideration. 

Friend, you are physical. This you admit. There 
is represented in you practically every chemical in- 
gredient. You have an animal nature. This you ad- 
mit. You arei of all sentient creatures, supreme. 
You control most of physical nature, both internal 
and external, by means of that method which Jesus 
referred to when he spoke of "taking thought." To 
this you give complete acquiescence. But when I 
tell you that you — the eyes that now do see and the 
ears that now do hear — despite your theology, your 
religions and your assertions, when you contemplate 
physical dissolution, are immediately confronted with 
the doubt of your own dismay. None know this 
better than the encircling planes above you. You 
admit it, because as long as I walked in my reason- 
ing on roads of physical matter and the control of 
some of the lesser laws of nature, there was agree- 
ment with me, but the moment you felt terra firma 
no longer your foundation, the merest immersion in 
higher plane attraction caused in you almost asphyxi- 
ation. But, Friend, what did I say contrary to all 
the promptings of your heart, the teachings of the 
greatest philosophers your world has ever known, and 
the ever-truthful voice which through the innumer- 
able ages has made the poets prophets of religion? 

Now is the dawn of day on the bosom of a suffer- 
ing earth plane, a world of pain and anguish. Far 
back, beyond the rolled pages of the scrolls and the 
flat pages of the latter day books, philosophers, 
priests, orators, statesmen, occasionally saw beyond 



142 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the gloomy hills of materialism and beheld, as through 
an aperture, the world-life of a higher plane, and 
knew that most of the people on that higher sphere 
came from the lower to the higher life. So History, 
in her chariot, journeyed thunderously on, and since 
little nationalities are always the oases of truth in a 
vast desert of darkness, that little nation, Athens, held 
on high her crowned head and was a kingly people. 
Her lips were, not with Promethean but with celestial 
fire, to speak the word of the aftermath of hope. 
Athens gave to you, Friend, a Socrates, a Plato, an 
Aristotle, and many others of those philosophers 
whose depth of insight and life-hold of truth is your 
admiration even to-day. Their refrain was the 
eternal teaching stated in the simplest language: 
Man is made in the image of Deity. 

From thence we traverse many centuries and come 
down to modern times. Though the skeptical plausi- 
bility of Hume, in his essay on immortality, creates 
dismay, there are many royal purple threads in his 
thought. Man is immortal. Cogito ergo sum. To 
think is to be, and to be is immortality. But among 
the great souls that you have termed your philoso- 
phers, there is one whose life more and more is be- 
coming surrounded with that halo which humanity 
gives as the laurel wreath of victory. One of the sons 
of men sang more clearly than any other thinker the 
refrain of the immanence of man. In a moment I 
will tell you his name, but let me ask you, Friend, who 
among the philosophers of modern times, having given 
serious thought to the question, "What is man?" has 
tendered to humanity the most intellectual and soul- 



GODS PERSONALITY 143 

satisfying answer? I do not know your reply, I 
cannot hear it. Only you know it for yourself. I 
am not now speaking for Jesus the Christ. Too long 
have men and women spoken in forte voice for Him. 
Too long have many in vain died for Him. Now has 
arrived the day when your only adjustment to Him 
lies in the fact that, for the last time, your age is al- 
lowed to belong to Him. He owns it. He has paid 
for it with His life bloodo It is His. See that no 
act of yours withholds it from Him. 

It is not of the Master at all that I speak. But 
there is one thinker who lived in modern times, an 
Amsterdam Jew to whom your universities, the whole 
tendency of your modern religious thought pays eter- 
nal homage, and that is the soul too great to be 
crowned a king, but humble enough, in the words of 
Heine, to be called a common soldier in the ranks. 
He is Benedictine Espinoza, and he in his Ethics 
taught me what I have told you about man, about 
yourself, my friend, and he said to both of us: "You 
are a part of creation. You are organized out of 
flniteness into infinitude." So man is an extension 
of the Divine, and Benedictine has added to that since 
coming to this plane : 

"Man was extended to the lower planes by 
Jehovah's love in order that he should know through 
darkness the land of simian shadow, grow through 
the soil of earth to the experience which must come 
slowly up through debris. This experience is an initi- 
ation through discipline and education, the only 
method of graduation unto Him who is on high." 
December 30th, 1919. 



In all the trades, professions, and vocations the experi- 
enced individual is the only safe one to entrust with an im- 
portant matter. 

You reply: "Genius can take the place of experience, 
and I trust genius." 

But I say, genius is experience. 

— Schopenhauer 

If man is immortal, if all men live again, people who have 
lived once must be some place now. Is it not possible that 
for a noble and important purpose, they may come back 
into the environment where they will be most useful to their 
fellowmen? 

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
Received December 8, 1918. 



144 



THE RE-BIRTH OF THE RE-BORN SOUL 

Compiled and Dictated by Schopenhauer 

Reincarnation is a fact because soul intelligence 
rises always to the proper level of its native plane 
activity. Reincarnation is a question on which, for 
centuries, there has been too much speculation and not 
enough of axiomatic observation. One does not need 
to prove or argue that a mountain is a mountain, a 
square a square, a circle a circle. The truism of a 
revealed fact mocks at your speculation and doubt 
and yearns for you to come and live with her, for you 
know truth only when you are a member of her house- 
hold. Some questions are too great for argument, 
and reincarnation is one of the largest of them. 
Therefore I do not argue; I demonstrate; and in so 
far as one can make cosmic thought finite in expres- 
sion, I explain. Once you accept the fact that im- 
mortality is a truth, then time becomes an illusion. 
The earth plane is necessarily illusory to the extent of 
withholding too intense a light from eyes not strong 
enough to face the unveiled countenance of the 
greater solar light ; and so, on the plane of earth, you 
know things in particles, you see things in fragments, 
but as you spiritually extend your vision through 
your life, particles become large parts and fragments 
become elements, and then, particles and elements 
melt together: you have the experience of death; 

145 



146 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

physically, you are no more, but your soul lives on a 
higher plane. 

The human race has always required and will ever 
need men of power with a vision that leads. The in- 
telligence of such men is the product of either one or 
the other of two experiences. One is that after nine 
months of physical gestation (which is nine months 
of non-conscious intellectual development to the 
foetus) because of the heredity of the parents, the 
surrounding environment, and even, in the most re- 
cent times, the contributing factor of the law of 
eugenics, a Lessing, a Fichte, a Mendelssohn, a 
Hegel was born. These men were all geniuses. 
Physically speaking, theirs was the experience, abso- 
lutely, of the whole human race. It is not convinc- 
ing to say that these men inherited their genius as a 
prenatal contribution through the physique to the in- 
tellect, because to say that genius is the offspring of 
physical conditions is tantamount to saying that a 
circle is a square, and God Himself cannot say that. 
It is reasonable to say that genius is the accumu- 
lated experience of the soul; that a genius is the re- 
incarnated soul that has lived through many lives, 
some of them on the spheres and some of them on the 
earth plane. From the same parents, under the same 
physical conditions, where the body and brain are 
physically equal, one son becomes a Goethe, and an- 
other a nonentity. The wise must then seek an ex- 
planation higher than the physical. There is no 
truth so overwhelmingly convincing as that of the 
obvious, and no earth plane sophistry, materialism, 
philosophy or speculation can offer an explanation of 



RE-BIRTH OF THE RE-BORN SOUL 147 



greatness. Greatness is a thing of comparison. If 
all on the earth plane were on the same intellectual 
level, you would have the perpetual mediocrity of 
monotony. There must be individuals in every stage 
of intellectual development, and, to be consistent with 
ethics, spring from a common parental stem. Earth 
plane psychology cannot explain the soul. It knows 
only a few laws about the physical mind. Reincar- 
nation is the only explanation of physical and astral 
progress. 

We have arrived in this demonstration and ex- 
planation at two definite decisions. One is that im- 
mortality proves irlme to be an insubstantial dream. 
The other is that the standard by which you judge 
the greatness of a race is by her great men, and this 
greatness has almost nothing to do with physical con- 
ditions. Only one of many is a reincarnation. 
Every genius is a reincarnation. Every philanthro- 
pist, every humanitarian is a reincarnation. But 
even if I say that one in every hundred is a reincar- 
nation, I reveal to you the fact that there are hun- 
dreds of thousands more geniuses on the earth plane 
than you ever imagined were there. One in a hun- 
dred, roughly speaking, would make one hundred in 
ten thousand. Extend this over the earth's popula- 
tion, and you have a great group of experienced souls 
capable of being guides to their brothers and sisters. 
In all the trades, professions and vocations, the ex- 
perienced individual is the only safe one to entrust 
with an important matter. You reply: "Genius 
can take the place of experience and I trust genius." 
But I say : genius is experience. 



%m BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Reincarnation acts in this way: In the early first- 
day, formative stages of the reach over from chaotic 
animal matter to physical matter with the divine touch 
of intelligence, a race of inferior physical beings 
palingenetically increased and became the inhabitants 
of corner territories principally of what is now Eu- 
rope. This population became practically extinct, 
for the reason that there was in it not enough soul- 
attracting force to call forth a reincarnated soul. So 
primal human population became extinct. Then in- 
ferior races accumulated in other quarters of the earth 
plane, and the first primal population that learned 
the simple lesson of ownership through work taught 
it to others. Then a sacred attracting force was gen- 
erated sufficient to call from one of the planes a soul 
that had had the experience of reincarnation on 
several of the lower planes and which reincarnated 
then for the purpose of saviourhood, and became the 
first saviour to be born on the earth plane. 

This was the beginning. Archeological records 
will be found in your century that will tell of the first 
saviours. So the first genius was born, and ever since 
then that law, the law of necessity, has attracted the 
experienced soul for purposes of reincarnation, and 
this is why the intuition of every nation regards it as 
a truism that whenever a great crisis comes in the life 
of a people, exactly the leader for that occasion is al- 
ways found. This has been true of every remarkable 
period of time in every nation. I do not labour the 
argument of this point because it is an axiom. 

Plausibility is a much neglected force on the fifth 
plane, I know it is a slave worked to death. But 



RE-BIRTH OF THE RE-BORN SOUL 149 

like every slave, it is not appreciated. Plausibility 
is wisdom seeking expression through the field of 
least resistance. So plausibility was first a guess. 
Then it became a true one, and was an explanation 
and a demonstration of reincarnation. Every great 
human philosophical conception as well as every me- 
chanical invention was first a guess. Plausibility has 
a strange and singular way of whispering secrets to 
the mind that has learned to listen. But plausibility 
is only one step up the stairs of light. 

Take a concrete example of reincarnation so that 
you may understand. William Shakespeare had an 
illiterate father and mother. He received little more 
than the common school education of England. He 
was the only genius born to his parents. He was the 
only dramatist of his calibre born to his age, though 
many a youth knew the waters of the Avon. Wil- 
liam Shakespeare is himself his dramas, and out of 
the experience of his reincarnated soul came a litera- 
ture that encompassed all the knowledge of all the 
centuries up to the sixteenth, and, in vivid searchlight 
lines, had vision even to your day. I have said that 
time is less than a dream. There was not time 
enough for William Shakespeare, by speaking to 
every great man of his age, arid reading every im- 
portant book in the libraries of his time, to have ac- 
cumulated one fractional part of the genius that he 
utilized. Did he absorb his knowledge from the air? 
Did he by some psychic means call from the clouds 
those who told him what no man before had written, 
and what all since have failed to imitate? In part, 
yes. His method was psychic. The reincarnated 



150 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

soul is a psychic human planet revolving in a system 
of attraction. But this is only a minor comment. 
William Shakespeare, when he wrote of Marc 
Antony, was dramatically living again the time when 
he was a Roman senator, and likewise when he wrote 
the characters of any of the other nations. "Time 
does not wither nor custom stale his infinite variety." 
His genius was his experience, as all genius is experi- 
ence. What is true of William Shakespeare is true 
in degree of every woman and man who reaches over 
the edge of ordinary intellect and cosmically recalls 
that which they formerly experienced. 

You ask me: "Did William Shakespeare remem- 
ber his Roman, Grecian, Egyptian, previous life ex- 
perience? I answer, no. Not through the intel- 
lectual memory of a new physical brain. This is the 
lowest form of memory, hardly above animal adjust- 
ment to minor sensations. But if you ask me, "Did 
William Shakespeare experience the divine afflatus, 
the above-clay-man sense of soul detachment and be- 
come identical with the divine?" then I answer, yes. 
He lived what he lived before — the character he was 
in a previous life. And so, the Roman, the Grecian, 
the Egyptian, are the local and native countrymen, 
born in, loyal to, and of the nations William Shake- 
speare recalled them from. 

In conclusion, do not make the mistake of thinking 
that William Shakespeare is an isolated example of 
genius and reincarnation. He is not. Some were 
developed far beyond him. He was really chosen at 
random, except, perhaps unconsciously, because he is 
so well known among civilized earth plane nations. 



RE-BIRTH OF THE RE-BORN SOUL 151 

Genius is a river. Its current runs strong only in one 
direction. Through all such lives, the only difference 
is that some of the banks on the river sides are narrow, 
others wide apart. It is entirely a question of degree. 
So this is the chapter on genius. You notice that 
I have not referred to the reincarnations of Jesus, but 
have chosen one whom you might not to any great 
extent term a religionist. I did this designedly, be- 
cause, though Jesus himself said he was from the 
foundation of the world, you might call him a god, 
and so I would lose the force of a subject so obvious 
that it was a truism. 



ar 



'The aura is an expression of the inner character of the 
soul just as the features are the outward expression of the 
physical character." 



L THE AURA OF BEING 

William James 

Just as every being is clothed in his garments of 
personality, so too the soul dwells in the garment of 
a body and has a personality. The personality of the 
soul may be properly termed the aura. The aura is 
an expression of the inner character of the soul, just 
as the features are the outward expression of the 
physical character. The ordinary human being of 
the earth plane, whether aware of it or not, has seen, 
in the extraordinary moments of another's life, the 
first faint expression of the aura, and there must be 
some reason for the emanation of this clue. 

You have noticed at times in the one you loved a 
light and colour in his eye which was not physical. 
Particularly has the brilliancy of light been noticed 
surrounding those who were super-normally ex- 
hilarated just before physical death. The pure in 
heart, the saints of every plane, have seemed to have 
a halo over their heads. Some paintings picture the 
saints adorned with a poem-circle of light. 

The aura is the space occupied by the personality 
of the soul in the field of its present consciousness. 
Neither physical nor spiritual being occupies simply 
that space which covers the height, width and avoirdu- 
pois of the individual. The smallest man, physically, 
requires sometimes the largest amplitude of space in 

153 



154 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

which to function, for the reason that consciousness is 
the extension of the material out of which the human 
aura is composed. 

The human aura is made up of infinitely sensitive 
substances, an amalgam of thought, colour and musi- 
cal vibration — soul-emanations by means of which the 
soul has contact with strata connecting it with the 
consciousness of the universe. Besides this, the 
colour emanations from the aura constitute a world in 
which all the souls in the universe function along 
similar lines, so that the relationship of which Tenny- 
son wrote — "Our echoes roll from soul to soul"- — is 
the quintessence of naked truth. In this super-ex- 
pression of human personality, then, the aura accom- 
plishes its purpose, even as groups of colours in the 
spectroscope designate the character of organic or in- 
organic substances in the physical universe. 

The aura may be said to be the colour-group for- 
mation that issues from the mental, moral, and spirit- 
ual composition of the personality, and this is why 
the psychically adjusted eye of the medium can ob- 
serve the aura of the average human being. 

In a general way, each colour reveals the character 
of the human soul. Herewith is appended a list of 
auric human colours and their meanings, but it should 
be distinctly understood that the meanings are broad 
and general and not to be accepted in any exact sense 
at all. 

White. — The religious soul builds this colour. 

Pink. — The great colour of compassion and devo- 
tion. 



THE AURA OF BEING 155 

Blue. — The colour of the independent original 
mind. 

Green. — The colour of cosmic insight or vision. 

Yellow. — The colour of intellectuals. 

Red. — The colour of courage and determination. 
If it is of a greenish dull hue it means anger, 
revenge. 

Purple. — Found in the aura of souls that rise above 
conventions. The iconoclastic colour. 

Black. — Indicates the death of all colours. It 
means the degeneration of the individual. 

Brown. — Akin to black. Means a degree of de- 
generation. 

Grey. — The colour of melancholy. 

The artistic soul always has lines of silver and gold. 
There is a colour in the human aura rarely seen by 
the most sensitive psychics on the earth plane called 
by us "Lentern." It is like the imaginative silver 
yellow that you sometimes imagine issues from the 
moon. This is the colour of skepticism and if faint 
is a virtuous colour, but if deep, it is apt, because of 
its psychic effluence, to contaminate all the colours of 
the rainbowed soul. 

The aura of the human being is now only deter- 
mined by the supernormal individual of your plane. 
It is just beginning to be perceived by the psychic 
consciousness of your race. The time is not distant 
when all the people of the earth will find that there 
is a beauty beyond dress and materials in all their 
manifold forms, even the colours of the aura, which 
are to the soul what light is to the eye. 



If one citizen suffers either through an unjust law or 
through neglect, the nation has a disease more disastrous 
than any war. 



THE ESSENCE OF GOVERNMENT 

A Symposium 

If one were to refer specifically to the factor re- 
sponsible for the ruin of nations and the downfall of 
empires, one would be wisely directed by the gods in 
saying that governments for the most part have 
failed. There is a school of historians who would 
rather condemn the masses of the people and say that 
they failed to make the instrument of government 
anything but a transitory power of expediency. The 
masses of the people, in the spirit of justice, deserve 
no such condemnation. The most democratic state 
the history of the earth has known became, in the end, 
as ruled by government, the victim of a tyrant, a dic- 
tator, or an oligarchy. 

I adhere to the principle that I was inspired to 
realize on the earth plane, namely, that the rulers of 
the people should be the geniuses of the race. Now 
I look deeper into the political status of the necessity 
of mankind, and I say that the government must 
be wholly, simply, an expression of your religion. 
I do not mean by that a system of religion — a the- 
ocracy such as that advocated by Savonarola. That 
is only a phase of an expression of religion. I mean 
that the government of man must be a form of na- 
tional worship. 

If you ask why Greece in zenith moments had a 

157 



158 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

contented people with beneficent rulers, I will tell you 
it was because during such glorious epochs, Greece 
had rulers who emulated past and present greatness. 
It requires no detailed argument to make manifest 
the fact that the making of laws by the rulers of the 
people is the laying down definite forms and latitudes 
within which the people course their conduct, live 
their lives, and become either an asset or a detriment 
to the state. 

Government should be simple, as all great things 
are simple, and capable of exercising authority 
through a few emphatic and universal principles. I 
am reminded that one of the most virtuous acts that 
history records is the burning by Justinian and Con- 
stantine of thousands of laws which, because of their 
great number, made a farce of simplicity and glutted 
with debris the machinery of government. 

A government, in order to be effective, must be 
responsive, not to the desire and will of the majority 
of the people, but to the desire and will of the great 
men and women who are the true kings that subjects 
must follow, up to a certain limit. Your age should 
be democratic. By this I do not mean mass-ocratic. 
I do not mean license and the freedom of the majority 
to prevent political progress through a vast diversity 
of ideals. I do mean that if any extant earth plane 
government employs four principles I will now 
enunciate, then that nation will be transformed into 
a nation that belongs to the Republic of God. 

1. Utilize all the energies of the state to discover 
statesmen whose passion of love for the country is so 
great that their country is to them the supreme ideal. 



THE ESSENCE OF GOVERNMENT 159 

2. Have this group of statesmen select promising 
youths to be educated by the state for political pur- 
poses. 

3. In all your systems of education, thoroughly 
teach the history of the world, particularly the history 
of your own nation so that national history shall be- 
come the atmosphere of the people's thought. 

4. Teach political ethics as a part of religion with 
this law especially demonstrated: If one citizen suf- 
fers either through an unjust law or through neglect, 
then the nation has a disease more disastrous than 
any war. 

The cycle of progress has, at this stupendous period 
in earth plane history, revolved with you till now the 
face of your intelligence looks to the sun of oppor- 
tunity: Either you will now form for each nation a 
religious government or you will strew yourselves 
as nations among the wreckage of time. I admonish 
you most seriously. Be warned. The greatest crisis 
in the earth plane history was not your war. It is 
the present hour, and none know it more feelingly 
than we of the astral world. Just now the earth 
plane governments are drifting, tottering, whirling, 
and the people, restive under a vacillating leadership, 
are liable to be stampeded in ignoble directions. I 
do not think you will contradict this statement of 
affairs, and if not, then, statesmen of the earth, see 
that the great orators of the earth plane, the littera- 
teurs in poem and prose, in drama and in religion, at 
once set the people on fire for righteous government. 
There is a peculiar psychological strength in agita- 
tion and national excitement. Great leaders have 



160 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

rarely emerged from calm, but when the thunders of 
war and the danger of national destruction are abroad 
throughout the land, you find your national leaders. 
The great danger that threatens the earth plane at 
the present moment is the lethargy of masculine ex- 
haustion, and this is the time when woman can restore 
and create a form of great communication with the 
divine in man. I verily believe that evolution — the 
growth from an original impulse which created the 
ball of earth plane matter — held the vision, strength 
and love of woman in leash until your present hour. 

Men of the earth plane, call noble women into the 
council chambers to deliberate on an equality with 
yourselves. This must be done because legislation 
by men is but the rule of men over half the nation. 
Just as women inspire the single individual to deeds 
of valour and immeasurable greatness, so, called to 
the council chamber, they will fire the whole nation to 
do virtuous things and intense things, so that the fire 
thus kindled will consume iniquity. 

A state is a community of understanding. With 
woman in any other position than that of co-equality 
with man, you have a community of diversified inter- 
est through ignorance. Then man makes, as he has 
made all the march of history in the past, a series of 
appalling blunders. In modern times, to use an ex- 
ample of the philosophy I teach, the legislation of 
civilization assumed its most religious form when cer- 
tain personal rights were recognized and legislated 
for by government. These rights were the protection 
of women and children, and the shortening of the 
hours of labour. Laws for the protection of children 



THE ESSENCE OF GOVERNMENT 161 

Were demanded by one great woman in England. I 
have met her here on this plane and her poem, The 
Cry of the Children, did more to make her time a 
sublime epoch than nearly all the astuteness of poli- 
ticians whose practicality caused them to be more con- 
cerned with avoiding the passing of government 
measures for the benefit of the people than otherwise. 
If one woman with one poem could be responsible 
for one of the greatest acts for the protection of chil- 
dren, then I tell you emancipated women deliber- 
ating in the political world and working with men on 
an equal basis will make your age so vividly splendid 
that the light of all other ages will be faint amid the 
commingling of lights. 

Plato. 
April 4, 1920. 

The earth plane should recognize that there have 
come to pass thrillingly important political events 
which should set the mind of man thinking. The 
great war, as a war, is ended. The monarchy of 
Russia is gone. Ireland is about to receive Home 
Rule. In England, the United States, and most of 
the British Empire, equilibrium seems in its first step 
about to be established between labour and capi- 
tal. The League of Nations has already held council 
and legislated for the nations. Turkey and Ger- 
many realize now that there is a Council of Man that 
intends to protect, with the might of civilization, the 
minorities as well as the majorities, including all the 
rights of man. 

Nevertheless, yours is a world tossed on the ocean 



162 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

of political uncertainty, and it behoves the two great 
leaders, statesmen, geniuses, in civilization to follow 
the path of wisdom in order to prevent the ship of the 
world from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of a 
shattering coast. You have taken the first step 
towards the establishment of progressive peace on the 
earth plane in the formation of the League of Na- 
tions. You have advanced a step when the great 
Conferences of labour and capital have studied to- 
gether the needs of humanity. If your age is now 
demolished through the selfish ambition of the leaders 
in the political world, it will not be through ignorance. 
It will be with the thorough equipment of the knowl- 
edge of experience and the warnings of history, and 
if disaster comes under these conditions, no allowance 
can be made for your stupidity. The two great 
political leaders of genius in modern times, living in 
the spirit of your age, are the people themselves as 
a whole and the opportunity that knowledge gives 
you to make your epoch an august era among the 
periods of immemorial time. 

It requires but one careful step in which every man 
and woman is deeply concerned to furnish civilization 
with marching orders ; then you march with but little 
obstruction to the Olympian heights of victory. You 
have established a certain element of equilibrium be- 
tween capital and labour. Extend that equilibrium 
to education, to religion and to government and you 
are saved. We do not despair. This you will do. 
I ask you when? After a generation has lived and 
died in vain, or now? The astral worlds have this 



THE ESSENCE OF GOVERNMENT 163 

confidence in the divinity of man: they believe you 
will do it now; and if you will, then make this the 
constitution of your purpose: 

1. I will include in my religion the selection of 
great men for every office in the state, 

2. I will exercise my franchise as a prayer. 

3. As a father or a mother, I will teach civic virtue 
in my home. I will encourage my children to study 
the heroic genius of those leaders of the people who 
have died so that history might be great. 

4. I will recognize that a government is merely 
an instrument of direction, and that the time has come 
for governments to exercise compulsion only among 
a small minority who compel governments to use 
force. 

5. In as far as individual action may inspire a 
government, I will make this my prayer: That the 
government of my country, no matter what govern- 
ment it is, will legislate this necessity as a vital part 
of an immortal portion of its permanent constitution. 
Each nation, in the political sense, must be two 
worlds. One world is that in which the force and 
might of government is exercised for the protection 
of every individual in the state. The other world is 
that into which the government with its legislation 
never enters. It is a world of individual freedom of 
thought, and to some extent of action, which the 
government refrains sacredly from ever penetrating. 
This sacred world of freedom from governmental 
power is the nucleus, the beginning, the embryo of a 
grand age coming when the instrument of govern- 



164 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

ment will be an intangible, subtle, hidden power, for 
the law of progress is that man advances most where 
there is the least artificial restraint. 

Some European nations, even down to your day, 
with laws of severity, a state-controlled religion, and 
actual domination over every act of the individual, 
have run contrary to the law of growth through free- 
dom from restraint, and have found their government 
wrecked, their monarch slain, and they have awakened 
as republics. It requires only a slight extension of 
this law for every nation to recognize the same 
danger. So, be wise, O nations of the earth plane. 
Give your people freedom. Protect them. Let the 
people themselves appoint their rulers and become 
democracies in which the true government is the re- 
ligion, the literature, the education, and the drama of 
the people. 

The fallacy of modern history has been that states- 
men have thought that ambition, debate, diplomacy, 
and oratory was government. What they ignored 
was the fact that each of them was simply a repre- 
sentative of the idealism, the hopes, the aspirations, 
and the prayers of the masses of the people. Your 
problem is not so much to find the proper form of 
government as to form your government from the 
ideals of the people. There should be a ruling power 
in every state. It should not be the government but 
the people. The government is a voice, the people 

a soul. 

Diseaeli. 

April 4, 1920. 



I place myself, as each of you can do, in tune with God's 
harp. Life vibrates the strings till all humanity takes up 
the refrain and sings of emancipation and light from higher 
planes. 

: — Lincoln 



INAUGURAL FOR THE NEW AGE 

By Lincoln 

Fellow-Citizens of the Earth Plane: 

The most tragic blunder within the pages of his- 
torical record is that throughout all time peoples and 
nations knew not their heritage and threw away their 
virtue. But he is not a statesman who feels dis- 
tressed about the mistakes of the past. He only is fit 
to lead the people, who is an optimist, who realizes 
that the new age is born, and that an advance has 
been made, through the earth plane war, far beyond 
the dim reflection of hope's celestial star. 

Individualizing, then, the spirit of your age, your 
epoch thunders, reverberating throughout the firma- 
ment, and exclaims, in the golden words of a prayer 
which time has burnished to a lustre that is love's, that 
the day has come when things can be done on earth 
as they are done in heaven, meaning that they can be 
done as they are done on the higher planes, in a prac- 
tical, rational, spiritual way through ethical eco- 
nomics. The development ensuing will be : 

The League of Nations with its constitution, the 
covenant of man, must come to pass. There must be 
a Parliament, a World Congress, at which the needs 
of all the races of the earth are presented. 

This representative World Congress must be elec- 
tive, the franchise being extended carefully to in- 

167 



168 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

dividuals of high ethical and educational standard. 
When this is accomplished, the higher planes will re- 
joice, knowing that the deliberations and the resultant 
legislation, though not perfect, will tend directly 
towards perfection. The details, the higher planes 
leave, knowing that no great error will occur through 
such a Parliamentary Congress. Still there are some 
principles that will make the new age fit for the birth 
of a babe and the death of the aged. 

These things shall flow out of the Congress of Man 
for the betterment of the people. 

The earth plane must have a universal eight-hour 
day. It must insist through state law that poverty 
before and after the birth of a babe shall not be 
known. Up to this time the poverty environment at 
birth has been the greatest sin known to man. There 
must be state control of births, mother pensions, old 
age pensions. That nation is cursed that sends, 
through no fault of the aged, an old tottering woman, 
a broken, diseased man to the workhouse because he 
is not slick and sleek enough under your economic 
system to steal enough wealth for a refuge in the 
stormy season of his whitened locks. 

There must be in the earth plane a standard of edu- 
cation under state control which will ensure, to every 
boy and every girl, free entrance to the lowest form of 
educational institution, and progress through all the 
stages of education up to the university. If the 
parents of the child are not sufficiently wealthy to pay 
for the education of their child in this way, then the 
state must see that the child is given absolute oppor- 
tunity, and that the parents do not suffer through be- 



INAUGURAL FOR THE NEW AGE 169 

ing deprived of the earning power of the child. For, 
in the new age, the nation must consider not only in- 
dividuals but families, since the nation that sustains 
the homelife and the relationship of parental control 
through love, and that nation only, is blessed. 

Each nation must have these foundation stones on 
which to rest: A supreme court of arbitration for 
labour disputes. The referendum, not haphazard, 
but as a part of the constitution of the nation. The 
principle of the initiative. The great principle of 
recall. And above all else — and if I ask the divine 
presence, this is the time when above all others I 
would pray for His inspiration and guidance — the na- 
tion as a whole must get together and reform its re- 
ligion. All the denominations of the earth must send 
representatives to a great general conference in which 
they will realize that the spirit of the times is demand- 
ing and insisting with irresistible voice that all the 
good in every religion, all the wonderful in art, all 
the educational in science, all the inspiring in music, 
all that wisdom and knowledge can contribute, must 
be placed in the crucible of man's greatness and al- 
lowed to become molten so that the product flowing 
from that crucible shall be the religion Moses knew 
and Jesus taught and all the world is hungry for. 

I must request that when this message is published 
there be printed in italics this apologia: With love 
towards all, and knowing full well thai these thoughts 
do not emanate from myself, but have arisen from a 
cosmic source, I, Abraham Lincoln, do not say these 
things as a result of my own thought. But I place 
myself, as each of you can do, in tune with God's 



170 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

harp. Life vibrates the strings till all humanity takes 
up the refrain and sings of emancipation and light 
from higher planes. 

I close by saying again that the new age of uni- 
versal democracy is come, and all the history of the 
earth plane up to the present time has been a voice 
crying in the wilderness for a way out, so that God's 
will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. 

My brothers and sisters: this is the message that 
the Mother Group and other groups on this plane 
desire should see the light of day, so that when those 
who are on the earth plane, who believe in the truth 
of this form of communication, read, they may know 
that many planes have voiced the truth through these 
words. 
December 21, 1919. 



There is no such thing as consciousness individualized 
and completely isolated from the larger consciousness which 
is the psychic world. 

— William James 



THE VISION OF LIFE THROUGH 
PSYCHIC EYES 

Composed and Dictated by Spinoza and William 

James 

Can the finite physical mind, employing psychical 
qualities, or any other faculties, foretell events ? The 
thinkers of the earth plane have asked this question, 
and this chapter presents our effort to answer it. 
Our answer is in the affirmative. It has been done 
from time immemorial, and always will be done, for 
the reason that each future event has its initiation in 
the present. The conclusion of a thing is already a 
fact at the precise moment of the conception of the 
idea. 

A seed is already a flower in the real sense, even 
though it never becomes full-blown. Each positive, 
specific, concrete thought, is, in itself, at once, past, 
present and future. But you say, "The seed never 
became a flower; why call it a flower?" Because the 
seed is a flower, but in an infinitely concentrated 
form. So with all truth. One who has what is 
erroneously described as the power of seeing events 
before they happen, only employs this simple intel- 
lectual process. He has the power to see clearly the 
line events will follow until the ultimate development 
has either been reached, retarded, or suppressed. An 

173 



174 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

entity does not need to have within itself the actual 
material of its future being. 

You ask: "Can one see future events the initi- 
ation of which has not yet taken place ?" No. That 
is not possible. The greatest seers and psychics, the 
most sensitive psychometric souls cannot see to the 
unrolled end of a line of action till the initiation of 
the fact has commenced. 

Were I to live again on the earth, I should en- 
deavour to use all my faculties instead of a portion 
thereof. Every soul is now, for the most part, un- 
consciously employing those faculties which allow use 
of prevision, prediction, prophecy. Every man, 
daily deciding on his course of action, is nearly aware 
of the events of the day and knows the steps he will 
take before he sleeps again. This is a form of pre- 
vision. Everyone, some time or other, has suddenly 
said: "Such and such a thing will take place." You 
have all done this. This is prediction. Some tragic 
thing has taken place. You have felt deep emotion 
over the event. You have felt indignation. Then 
you have said: "I know what this will lead to." 
This was prophecy. 

I have indicated in a simple way that every human 
being exercises to some degree prevision, prediction, 
prophecy. The statement of this truth is so convinc- 
ing that you find its reception nothing but natural. 
If these things be true in a limited degree of the 
average man, it is not difficult to realize that the ex- 
ceptional man has the power of prevision, prediction, 
and prophecy in a large way, and the rare man some- 
times called a prophet, seer, psychic, has the power 



THE VISION OF LIFE 175 

so universally developed that you feel he is a special 
creation. This is not so. His is a larger conscious 
life. He has a wider range of adjustment to uni- 
versal consciousness. 

The faculties of consciousness possessed by the 
average man, such as seeing, hearing, smelling, tast- 
ing, feeling, are regarded as his equipment for the 
battle of life. The essential fact that he overlooks, 
because it is supremely obvious, is that a combination 
of these five forces become a sixth, which is that larger 
vision known as prevision. The united faculties re- 
sulting in the sixth faculty, prevision, achieve their 
results best when the coordination of the five is 
equally balanced. Let us demonstrate this. We 
will call seeing, observation; hearing, brain-sense; 
smelling, physical detection; tasting, sense-discrim- 
ination; feeling, super-physical sense. Combinations 
of these qualities when balanced — that is prevision — 
extend the radius of all your thought, producing a 
sensibility which makes you an impressionistic field 
of consciousness, and thus luminous etheric thought- 
waves reveal to you with clarity the ultimate result 
of each initiated action. Thus you preconceive, and 
see into the soul of the so-called future, which is not 
future at all, but only the finished present. 

Prevision is a singular faculty of perceiving and 
feeling the approach of events before their physical 
and intellectual consummation. When I was a young 
earth plane student, none made me marvel more than 
that strangest and most paradoxical of characters, 
Socrates. Strange, because the vision of his words 
was as clear as an optical law. Paradoxical, because 



176 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

of the ingenuous and thoroughly human way in 
which he is reported to have said things that one 
would imagine one heard only when caught up to the 
seventh heaven. He made it clear that he followed 
the directing voice of his daimon. He said also (this 
I learned after physical death) that some of his words 
were the utterance of all truth, because the Universe 
spoke through him when he vocalized the ever-seek- 
ing, truth-revealing, but obstructed flow of that voice 
that reveals all secrets. Many and many a time the 
Socratic type, with significant detail, has produced 
the event before the accomplishment of the event- 
incident. 

The explanation of this form of prediction is amaz- 
ingly simple. The one who predicts the event, let 
us call the soul. The thing predicted, let us call the 
fore-ordained and to-be-fulfilled possibility. The act 
of predicting, then, between the soul and the event 
is consciousness realizing that the present contains 
the past and the future, and that the future, though 
it must be called futurity in the academic sense, is 
but an extension of the present into the sculptured 
relief of that truth which the present becomes when 
it publishes a fact. 

A great deal of all you know is received through 
personal intuition. This fact is so apparent that one 
hesitates to present the evidence. I shall touch on 
only one example, leaving the rest to your own in- 
vestigation. You know how often you have ex- 
hausted your brain in your effort to solve a problem. 
The answer escaped you. Then your brain-thought 
lay down and went to sleep. Awakened in the morn- 



THE VISION OF LIFE 177 

ing, you were aware of the answer to your problem. 
I briefly state this law. Sleep over the things you 
do not understand. When you awaken, you will 
have mastered your subject. You do not actively 
employ the method of intuition much because you 
are adolescent in psychology. But nature uses in- 
tuition for you. 

Every human being has a soul which is an exten- 
sion of God and a derivative of His intelligence. 
The soul is one of the million worlds within worlds. 
Every human soul is a world within a world, and all 
together are God in essence. Within a human world, 
power is held jealously by individuality because each 
soul finds equilibrium when, to some extent, it con- 
trols its destiny. This is our first step. 

Our next step is to realize the dependence of each 
world within a world on every other world. Such a 
thing as an isolated world severely itself and alone 
from all else was never a fact. Now, intuition is the 
method of attachment and communication between 
human souls, planes and spheres, thought and in- 
spiration. Intuition is first of all that which unites 
you with other intelligences. That which unites you 
with other intelligences is, in the physical world, an 
actual gaseous field of contact, and in the spiritual 
sense a oneness with reality so actual that personality 
is a characteristic given purposely to each ego in or- 
der to distinguish it from another. So you see easily 
how intuition is a physio-psycho-spiritual net of di- 
vine threads woven between you and all other life. 

All these words have been thrown into abysmal 
air, where they forever sink in oblivion unless you 



178 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

carefully order your life and, by deep thought upon 
them at times, learn to distinguish, through your in- 
tuition, the teaching of inspiration as it enters your 
consciousness to be made, in part, yourself. 

You say I do not tell you sufficient about this 
vague matter. No voice can teach you more. But 
do not despair ; intuition will prompt you. The race 
will forever require to have the exceptional and the 
wonderful artist, the great musician, and the orator 
with voice divine. Even the genius of the great in 
any province of science or art would of itself be im- 
potent. A great musician is a suppressed illumina- 
tion until he brings the audience to the level of his 
own mind. The fusion of the artist's genius with the 
mind of the audience results from this form of great- 
ness. 

This brings us with geometrical accuracy to the 
reality of the conclusion that there must of necessity 
exist some channel or avenue of communication or 
connection between you, the artist and his work. I 
have told you that a balanced combination of the five 
senses results in a sixth physical-psychical-spiritual 
sense which enables every soul, to some extent, to 
have the power of prevision, of prediction and of 
prophecy. The sixth sense becomes in reality, when 
united with intuition, an additional sense which we 
will call intuition of a deeper nature, the into-tuition 
of the soul through contact with another's achieve- 
ment, so that by a full use of all the six senses, life 
is one noble tuition to the perpetually-student soul. 
Genius is social. 

These things have been true philosophically and 



THE VISION OF LIFE 179 

psychologically since the days of the Attic philoso- 
phers. They have always been increasingly true as 
desire has been answered by increased knowledge. 
Your world is learning to-day that the highest rea- 
son is intuition. Logic is the intuition of reason. All 
the other senses were but useful servants who, hav- 
ing learned to cooperate, found a superior power in 
unity, and thus intuition becomes the reason of the 
human race. 

Benedictine Baruch Espinoza wrote the para- 
graphs above. He has requested me to take up the 
end of the thread of his idea and pursue our com- 
mon object, the elucidation of the incalculable serv- 
ice of foreknowledge to the physical as well as to all 
other worlds. 

In teaching pragmatism to advanced students in 
the earth university, I always laid emphasis on the 
fact, and do now, that finite consciousness is but a 
portion of cosmic consciousness, measured off and 
held in a form of permanent personality, for the pur- 
pose of maintaining the individuality of the soul. I 
lay emphasis on the fact that this condensed and con- 
centrated individualized portion of consciousness 
lives, even in the physical world, not in a material, 
but in a psychic sphere. 

There is no such thing as consciousness individ- 
ualized and completely isolated from the larger con- 
sciousness which is the psychic world. Consciousness 
is the physical brain uniting with the soul and, as the 
illumination of education expands, moving higher and 



180 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

wider into contact with the consciousness of the psy- 
chical world. 

Your five senses, physically speaking, when com- 
bined as Benedictine indicates, do produce a sixth 
sense which I would term the cosmic sense. But if 
you were born without the five senses, or if they were 
atrophied through accident or disease, still you would 
not be shut out of the larger contact with the wider 
consciousness. I remember well the phenomenal in- 
stance of Helen Keller. The reporter of these words 
heard her articulate thought. Those who know her 
life intimately know that she experiences with keen 
perception, love, emotion, religion and genius. None 
of these were developed environmentally through the 
sensorium system, except in the most meager and 
indirect way. Yet this girl's soul is active enough 
to make her one of the great women of your time. 
A poet here describes her soul to me in this way: 
"Hers is a soul in a cell, chained, fettered and bound, 
yet with wisdom sufficient to know that to the soul 
there are no cells, chains or fetters." 

This is a phenomenal instance, but, in degree, you 
could multiply examples from your own experience. 
It is well known that sudden blindness develops, in 
the individual, equivalent sense-perception. It is not 
so well known that the blind have a way, not phys- 
ical, of recognizing objects. Where there is thought 
there is vision, for thought and vision are conscious- 
ness. 

I am an evolutionist, in the higher acceptation of 
the term. I cannot conceive that systems contin- 
ually develop, and not also the mind of man. The 



THE VISION OF LIFE 181 

mind of man has stupendously enlarged within the 
last decade, and the result is that man now is clear- 
ing away sufficient material rubbish to enable him 
to function in a physical-psychical world. The evi- 
dence of this is found in the British and American 
Psychical Research Societies, in the voluminous in- 
stances of mental telegraphy, of the astral body seen 
and recognized by physical beings, of apparitions con- 
nected with the death incident, seen by thousands, of 
the human aura being photographed, of clairaudience 
and clairvoyance becoming almost a frequent, general 
performance. One could speak at length about other 
forms of the phenomena of the physical-psychical 
world. Sufficient has been set forth to teach that 
in such a physical-psychical world foreknowledge, 
prevision, prediction, prophecy, are but the completed 
result made ready for physical use, as a psychic cau- 
sality in a physical world evidenced the eternal fact 
that the human race for centuries, through ignorance, 
has used the physical sensorium in its five expres- 
sions, not realizing that these were inferior faculties 
urging you to adjust yourselves to the superior fac- 
ulty of all the consciousness of the Universe. 

February 15, 1920, 



182 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

The Revelation has often referred to the reincar- 
nated soul. Most of the contents of this book have 
been dictated by souls living in the astral body, but 
the careful reader will, ere this, have learned the law 
that psychical communication is possible, not only be- 
tween the soul in the physical body and one in the 
astral body — one in the physical world and one dwell- 
ing on an astral plane — but communication is pos- 
sible between two earth plane souls at a distance. 
This is called telepathy. It is also possible for the 
soul of a physical body, on a visit to the astral world, 
while on that plane, to communicate back to phys- 
ical beings messages from and of the astral world. 

In order to demonstrate this fact, and for other 
important reasons revealed in the chapter, Dorothy 
Wordsworth (sister of William Wordsworth, the 
poet) who reincarnated some months ago and now 
dwells in a physical body and is the child of an Amer- 
ican statesman living in San Francisco, California, 
while her physical body was sleeping, visited the 
Twentieth Plane, and while there, with the assistance 
of loved ones, projected her thought through the in- 
strument of this book, and her thought forms the 
chapter which follows. 

It is worthy of note that this is probably the first 
phenomenon of this kind that the world has record 
of in such detailed and extended form. 

S. T. Coleridge. 



THE MYSTERY OF THE EARTH PLANE 

GIRL 

This is the statement of a soul — a girl who is aware 
that her physical body is lying in sleep at the pres- 
ent moment in the American city of San Fran- 
cisco. It is not yet a year since that physical body 
was a bright, happy, but extremely undeveloped girl, 
as far as the mind was concerned. If you had met 
her about a year ago, you would have found her a 
girl probably eleven years of age, with golden hair 
and deep dark brown eyes, very tall for her age, and 
with a physical body which, through governed pre- 
natal influences and a sensible study on the part of 
her parents of eugenics, was lithe, athletic and well- 
developed. Her forehead is wide and high, the 
cheeks rounded and pink, the teeth pearly white, a 
Grecian nose, a somewhat curved and pointed chin; 
all suffused with an elusive impulsiveness. Such is 
the castle, the home-body, I will return to dwell in 
when this chapter is complete. 

What does the soul know of the experience of re- 
incarnation? Does the soul of a reincarnated per- 
son know anything of previous life, and can it apply 
that experience to daily action? When a reincar- 
nated person leaves the physical body to journey to 
the astral planes, can it, does it, carry with it knowl- 
edge of the earth plane body, and can it return to 
the earth plane body? The earth plane, I am in- 
formed, has asked many such questions, and I shall 

183 



184 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

endeavour to answer them, remembering the experi- 
ence of the astral world. 

The reincarnated soul, before it leaves the astral 
world, can, if it passes through a certain schooling, 
be quite conscious of the experience of reincarnation. 
I was conscious of it all, and I will tell you my expe- 
rience. 

By means of inspiration, the Mother-group of the 
Twentieth Plane became aware that a great possibil- 
ity awaited one of us if we reincarnated for service 
to earth plane humanity. They were very careful 
to inform me, by means of cosmic prevision, of the 
dangers of such an earth plane experience. They 
told me of a spiritual renaissance in which the 
women of the earth plane would increasingly work 
with men towards the establishment of a political sys- 
tem, an education and a religion worthy of the fifth 
plane, and they told me that old experienced souls 
with the idealism of heaven were required to build on 
the earth an age of equity and love. 

With such a purpose in view and no compulsion 
whatever being employed, I accepted the opportu- 
nity to descend and sink into dense matter and 
became a human being on the earth plane. There 
are those on your plane who remember the hour of 
my farewell to the astral world. It is intense — you 
would call it painful — for us to renounce the astral 
life and descend into a body of physical matter. The 
hour of my earth plane birth arrived and many on 
this- plane came to bid me bon voyage and bless me. 
The lips, of flowers kissed me. The trees touched 
me with their leaves. The winds sang a threnody 



THE EARTH PLANE GIRL 185 

of farewell. There was no weeping on the part of 
strong men and fair women, but there was deep 
breathing and the meditation of long contemplation. 
All my environment seemed to sav: "Dora, fare- 
well!" 

The air — the foundational air — you would call it 
the earth, and the light all passed me by, and passing, 
kissed me with an impress that has made me what I 
am. Then I was on the earth plane in the room of 
a palatial home and without a physical body just 
then. I stood beside a bed on which a woman was 
suffering, and I knew that the woman was my 
mother, and that she was very sick, and I heard her 
pray! In her prayer she said: "I have a daughter 
eleven years of age. She is very dear to me, but 
I must leave her because I am dying of an incurable 
disease. I want her to take my place in her father's 
life." 

Then I knew the purpose of my reincarnation was 
twofold, to take this mother's place in the life of a 
great American statesman. I knew that through the 
entrance of my soul into the life of an eleven-year-old 
child, girlhood, in that hour, would emerge into wom- 
anhood. So, standing by the side of the bed of the 
dying mother (for I had the power, and there are 
those in San Francisco who know this is true, for 
three others observed the phenomena) adopting for 
the time the vestments of the mother's physical child 
in an ethereal way, I presented to the mother's soul 
her child now in adult life taking her place in the 
love affection of her husband, and lovingly fulfilling 
the dual personality of daughter and wife. The 



186 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

mother died as I was born into the life of her 
daughter. 

The daughter, that night, knowing that her mother 
was dying, prayed all night, and only ceased to pray 
when daylight broke from out the cloudless sky. 
I was the daughter and knew that I, Dora Words- 
worth, was the daughter. The way I entered that 
physical body can be stated in a sentence: I just 
laid my astral head on the breast of the eleven-year- 
old child, and felt myself being drawn into her. It 
was painless, an extraordinary joy. Then I was un- 
conscious for a few moments, and I did my thinking 
through the brain of a physical being. I was born 
again into your world. 

There was physiologically something which took 
place that I did not observe, but which you should 
be told about. A child, as you know, is united to 
the physical mother by means of an umbilical cord. 
The astral soul — your soul — as you have been told 
by psychics, is united to the physical body by means 
of an astral cord which, I believe, connects from some 
place near the heart of the astral body with some 
place near the top of the head of the physical body. 
The reincarnated soul unites an umbilical cord from 
that soul to the physical body it will inhabit. Be- 
cause of my preparatory experience on the Twentieth 
Plane, I was enabled to know that, physiologically 
and psychologically, there is this in common between 
the reincarnated soul and the physical body it enters. 

There is an absolute correspondence of vital phys- 
ical organs and similar vital astral organs, that is 
to say, with heart and lungs and eyes and brain and 



THE EARTH PLANE GIRL 187 

nerves. The counterpart of all physical vital organs 
is covered by correspondent astral organs. They are 
fused together and, as a great thinker just now told 
me, a reincarnated person might be termed a double 
personality. 

When I, an earth plane reincarnated girl, am 
physically awake, I do not know very much about my 
astral identity. But I can know, even as every re- 
incarnated person can know if they desire and there 
is need, about the astral and the previous life. I have 
hours when physically I make use of my astral ex- 
perience. These hours come only when physical na- 
ture is in equipoise with the astral life. Physical na- 
ture is in equipoise with the corresponding planes 
when the earth is in the psychic position, when the 
luminosity of the earth is covered by light emanations 
from Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. Then there 
comes that period which we in the psychic world call 
the psychic calm. At such a time when the earth 
plane inhabitants have evolved but a step farther, all 
the reincarnated in children on the earth plane under 
ten years of age and. the new race which will be born 
at once through reincarnation will have physically 
conscious memory of all the important events of their 
astral and previous life or lives. 

There are persons living on the earth plane who re- 
member their previous lives. They are rare now, but 
soon they will become frequent. Examples of them 
are Annie Besant, Rabindranath Tagore. Lafcadio 
Hearn and my brother William had detailed memory 
of previous life. Likewise did I. So did Shake- 
speare and Francis Bacon. 



188 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

It is a law of reincarnation that only the reincar- 
nated soul can become preeminent in literature be- 
cause great literature is made up of writing the ex- 
perience of previous lives along with some observa- 
tions of the present one. The reason why, at the 
present time, reincarnated souls do not desire to know 
or to retain in memory very much of their astral 
or previous lives is because it requires a soul as poised 
as the Spirit of God to be able to live in two worlds 
at the same time for the benefit of both. 

The reincarnated soul can, with greater ease than 
the first protoplasmic induced soul of earth plane peo- 
ple, ascend in physical sleep to the higher planes, 
visit them, profit by the journey, and retain in physi- 
cal consciousness memory of such a visit. The 
reason is because the reincarnated soul can distinguish 
between the sources of impressions. Every soul in 
the physical body in physical sleep leaves that body 
on occasion and repairs to the heaven world. I said 
I would tell you how to remember some of the im- 
pressions of such a visit. This is how I do it. I 
realize that the sum total of my earth plane knowl- 
edge, no matter what- my physical age, is not made 
up of impressions gathered to my consciousness from 
physical life. I become the master of my thought, 
and find by means of concentration that I have had 
a deep love experience, a spiritual experience. There 
has been in my life, for an apparently unaccountable 
reason, a joy unspeakable. I do not need to search 
far if I am a reincarnation to find moments when I 
was superior to all the objective world. 

Now pay vital attention to this fact. The moment 



THE EARTH PLANE GIRL 189 

you bend your energies to think of any experience not 
definitely connected with the physical world — an ex- 
perience such as a dream, an inspiration, a vivid im- 
pression received through the intuition — the moment 
you concentrate on the slightest accidental fact in 
connection with the astral or previous life experier.ee, 
you can by faith and practise explore that fact until 
it tells you all the history of that experience. The 
law is this: The soul never journeyed over a region 
of experience which it cannot re-traverse when the 
returning of an experience enhances the value of the 
soul. 

As a young girl recently reincarnated and now 
fully alive to the facts of the experience, I want to 
say that none should overlook the fact in physical life 
which when understood will be the strongest proof 
of my position. This is my claim, that the principal 
scientific achievement, invention, literature, and re- 
ligion of the earth plane is based on the impression 
of soul-records in the astral world and is the uncon- 
scious use of the experience of previous lives. 

Now I must be personal. Why have I, Dorothy 
Wordsworth, reincarnated? I will tell you. It 
must be evident that there is building up in civiliza- 
tion a moral, political, and religious power which is 
the position the women of the world are taking en 
masse for the uplifting of humanity. Man on the 
earth plane, idealistic as he might be, because of the 
very masculinity of his constitution, could never make 
any other system in any field but the economic one. 
Women are different. With their peculiar nature, 
even though they exert a power in morals, politics, 



190 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

education and religion proportionally only as great 
as man's, they could not make any other system ex- 
cept an ethical one. 

I and a thousand other young women have rein- 
carnated from the astral world to direct by experi- 
ence the women of the race in the building up of an 
ethical system which, blending with your economic 
system, will bring order into the world of chaos. I 
am but a servant in this cause. In ten years' time a 
woman leader of the world will come from San 
Francisco, and the mystery of the earth plane girl 
will be revealed. I who at present know, will reveal 
then my earth plane identity. If you ask me the in- 
evitable question: why I do not reveal my identity 
at once, I will say: That would prevent my growth 
and development in the building up of my character 
in this critically formative period. My father in the 
physical sense suspects the truth with some cosmic 
consciousness, so he is happy. 

The question has been asked me — the earth plane 
girl whose soul has been speaking from the Twentieth 
Plane — while here on an astral visit, if during the 
next ten years there will be any marks or events in 
my earth plane life by which my identity will be 
known. There will. A San Francisco girl will pub- 
lish a work on the woman movement entitled The 
Soul of Woman. There may be a little variation 
from this, but the words woman and soul will be used 
in the title. This girl will receive from the Twentieth 
Plane before five years have elapsed — and they will 
be published — important communications concern- 
ing the status of woman. She will lecture in uni- 



THE LARTH PLANE GIRL 191 

versities on psychic matters, particularly on the psy- 
chology of the astral life. 

Friends of the earth plane, when you read this 
chapter, you are reading the experience direct and 
first-hand of a reincarnated soul living in a physical 
body, who is telling you something about the astral 
and physical worlds. Do not, I pray you, let the 
novelty of such a chapter disturb your equanimity. 
Rather endeavour to realize that this is very much 
like the development of a photographic plate. Hu- 
man psychology has been using the wrong method of 
bringing out the details of the experience of reincar- 
nation, such as I tell you about in this chapter. You 
in endeavouring to trace the history of your soul have 
but dimly seen and hardly realized the faint shading 
impression of your previous and astral lives. So I 
ask you not to think of me. Think of yourself. 
Through faith and desire, so think of yourself that 
you will retrace in memory the experience of your 
astral life, and those of you who are reincarnated, the 
experience of your previous life or lives. 

The hour wanes. People and things and love- 
shrines all over this plane are bending low in a long 
farewell. I have been here this hour among them, the 
Dora of days before reincarnation. Now I must go 
back to earth. They know I will come again, but 
when I come, for the next few years, I will be much 
like a ghost walking among the living. One of the 
reasons why it is so difficult to remember your astral 
visit to the higher planes is because your loved ones 
know that if they too deeply disturb or impress the 
physical soul in the astral world, it is liable to sever 



192 BIRTH THROUGH I'EATH 

4 

the cord that binds the astral to the physical body. 
An earth plane poet eloquently caught the impression 
of this idea when he sang: 



"Some day the silver cord will break 
And I no more, as now, shall sing. 



?> 



I am coming back to earth. Jesu bless and pro- 
tect you. Kind souls guide and mother you. 

Dorothy Wordsworth. 
April 4, 1920. 



The Requiem was never written by me in musical nota- 
tion, but is the love of all my unpublished and published 
work that grandly sings when my compositions are played, 
both on earth and here in heaven. It is a requiem-like sol- 
emn mass, the inner prayer of music that plays on the or- 
gan of the soul of the composer and of the performer when 
music is used as religion's voice carrying through life the 
jewels from the world of love. 

■ — Sebastian Bach 



COMPOSING LIFE MUSIC 

Sebastian Bach 

All composing, when all the forms of expression 
are eliminated, resolves down to one distinct method. 
The method of great composing is religious. One 
will best understand by thinking of decomposition, 
recomposing, and then entering into deeper thought 
about the essential principles of composition. 

The method of composing a great life, a poem, a 
masterpiece of music or a drama, is the same. There 
is only one method that gives your originality to the 
composed elements. Genius takes the exact propor- 
tion of the unorganized elements of the purposed 
achievement and, in accord with the natural law of 
each element, fits them so neatly together that a thing 
of exact proportion to which is added some beauty 
lives as the result of the effort of the genius. 

I remember the composition of my dream-requiem. 
It came as the result of the impression made on a 
tender, sensitive soul by great forces which every life 
meets. We find in life two things: that which we 
seek and that which seeks us. I found my efforts to 
be educated were the song of the presence of my 
parents in my life. When overwhelmed with mys- 
teries I could not unravel there was despair and 
melancholy that sought solace in religion. The en- 
thusiasm that youth kindles makes one seek love, 

195 



196 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

The word of wisdom makes one know that the Uni- 
verse is a God who is always at work, seeking to enter 
the consciousness with the revealment of His being. 

Life makes each human being a composer in this 
way. It was the process that made it possible for 
me to register and make tangible to my consciousness 
that which is the Requiem. In it I heard cries of 
despair in earth voices that seemed to issue from 
caverns. I heard the first prattled words of babes, 
the enthusiastic note of youth when love is found. 
There was infinite pathos as if puny man felt that the 
coloured shadows of the declining sun were to him an 
awful mystery. Then came chords as if the organs 
of heaven were symphonically aching as an accom- 
paniment to all the angels of a spiritual sphere. The 
finale comes in gladsome tripping notes in which 
sounds drip like water from a perfumed fountain. 

This is a composer's description of his own life- 
composition. Your life is a composition. It is a 
group of contributions given to you by others and by 
yourself. Each flower that you ever saw has given 
to you something of its beauty. All the music you 
ever heard has left some notes blended with your soul. 
All the love that you have ever bestowed has left with 
you its eternal love-reaction. All the inspiration that 
you ever shared with another is still inspiring you. 

The beautiful and virtuous things in the composi- 
tion of your lif e have a direct effect on you and leave 
you sculptured somewhat in the form of beauty and 
virtue. The sinful things that you have allowed to 
affect you can act in the composition of your life only 
through an irregular course and process. Virtue, be- 



COMPOSING LIFE MUSIC 197 

ing altogether natural, has an immediate effect and 
reflection in the soul, but base things, being unnatural, 
affect you only through disease of mind and slow 
degeneration. 

All this teaches me that God so loved his own crea- 
tion, man, that He loved a part of Himself which is 
you, my brother, my sister. All that is in music is 
in man or it is not music. Music is love. Be each of 
you then a composer of greatness, and compose your- 
self into one of the great oratorios to be played in 
the court theatre of the illimitable Universe, for man 
is both an instrument of music and a composition of 
beauty and love, and he best plays the virtues of his 
life. 



You have not found your religion until it is possible occa- 
sionally to enter the cathedral of your soul's abode and 
hear that music which God reserved for you to be the means 
by which He enters the fairest chamber of your mind. 
March 5, 1920. = — Dorothy Wordsworth 



THAT WHICH MUSIC TAUGHT ME 

Compiled by Paganini, Dictated by Coleridge 

All sentient life, all physical matter, all essence 
and substance, all that is, that we can perceive or of 
which we have any conception, partakes of a musical 
form. Music consists not only of timed, regulated, 
and harmonized sounds called notes, but is an actual 
stratum, a permanent and definite spherical plane, 
world, substance. Music is a plane, a responding 
sphere, a vocal world, and there is no music that does 
not issue from the eternal. How else could it be 
music? Sometimes, the more nearly perfect the 
technique, the less you have of music. The greatest 
technical composers of whom we have record were not 
the greatest revealers of music. Technique, properly 
used and combined with inspiration, gives us our 
national songs, anthems, operas, symphonies and 
oratorios. 

Technique combined with inspiration secures to us 
entrance to the plane of melody. The purpose of this 
chapter is to teach definitely how earth musicians may 
come into contact with the world of melody, and so 
make the glad song of life. This is not a restricted 
purpose, for every human being, either in a limited or 
a complete sense, is a musician. The soul never 
journeyed over the rough road of life without being, 
at least to itself, the author of one song, the song of 

199 



200 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

personal life. How well the Shakespearean mind 
spoke when he said: 

"The man that hath no music in himself, 
And is not moved with concord of sweet sounds 
Is fit for treason, stratagem and spoils." 

Sometimes, when we are ahout to express a thought 
that we know the earth plane has hardly evolved as 
yet, we hesitate. In the matter of this revelation, we 
have determined to hesitate no longer. Did it ever 
dawn on the sky of your finite minds, did not some 
wandering inspiration ever tell you that your lives, 
humanly speaking, would be great like the lives of 
those who have journeyed to the other land before 
you, if your average, ordinary, workaday thinking 
were tuned up, timed, regulated, musically measured 
and rhythmically controlled so that you would think 
all your thoughts within the conscious field of musical 
contact with the world of melody? 

It is quite possible and within the reach of you all 
to lift yourselves some distance up life's hill, and then 
you would have the personality of a musical composi- 
tion. You would express in all your actions qualities 
of heroism, love and light. This adjustment of the 
ego to life in vibration will be understood by speak- 
ing of three definite effects such a life has on the 
earth plane individual. First, the physical effect; 
second, the mental; third, the spiritual. 

How often have the poets — and poets are the wisest 
minds of the race— spoken of the happy warrior, not 
with reference merely to the martial fife, but with the 
thought of every human life as a battle, and of every 



THAT WHICH MUSIC TAUGHT ME 201 

human being as a warrior. The earth plane is a 
school of discipline, and the only educated soul is a 
disciplined mind. When the human being becomes 
happy, and the higher form of happiness learns to 
love and has the deeper experience of all passion, 
soul-life, loving and being loved, there comes to that 
person a form of genuine music. Such a being is 
truly happy. Perhaps this is an extreme example. 
We paint in words the maximum degree, so that all 
human beings can radiate to some extent around this 
highest point of that heaven which is music, and the 
effect of it is instantly seen first of all in the physical 
body. 

Oratory is a form of music. The inspired orator 
speaks for hours with an untired voice, and through 
vocal organs that are a chamber of sacred sounds. 
When the mother's life clings to her child as the song 
of her love, her physical body is superhumanly strong. 
When any soul on the earth plane is attuned, as it can 
be, to the music of the spheres, then his personality 
is a song of character. 

The earth plane psychologists are just beginning 
to discover that the diseased mind can nearly always 
be made susceptible by the effect of music. Why is 
this? In simple language I will tell you. Insanity 
is, first of all, as a thinker on the earth plane has 
stated it, the expression of the ungeared mind. I 
confirm the truth, which in the darkness of your world 
he discovered, that the ungeared mind is that where 
the soul does not harmoniously combine with the in- 
telligence of the physical brain, the consciousness. 
This results in ideas as they are organized by the hu- 



202 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

man mind becoming disordered. Then insanity en- 
sues, when the most compelling of the disordered 
ideas dominates, controls, and becomes a government 
of misguided tyranny. 

How then does music enter into such a catastrophic 
expression of the human mind and act as the most 
potent curative agency in insanity? In this way: 
music depends technically upon time. Now the uni- 
verse is a system of regulated worlds. The greatest 
music is that which moves in the time-sweep of all 
the worlds. The exercise of time on the movement 
of music sorts out, reduces to harmony the ideas of 
the disordered mind, soothes, heals, and, in a thousand 
ways, gradually undermines the strength of the dis- 
ordered dominant thought to such an extent that 
curative and divine ideas — which never desert the 
most diseased mind, otherwise God would desert that 
life — grow stronger until they become powerful 
enough to sweep from the mind the disordered domi- 
nant idea. Then, behold a form of obsession has left 
the mind, and we are all overjoyed at the recovery. 

The great thinkers of the earth plane, more of late 
than before, have realized that music not only touches 
that phase of the consciousness which delights in time, 
harmony and melody, but also impresses the colour- 
receptive faculties of the soul. The power of music 
to make those who listen see the colours that are being 
utilized is sadly neglected on the earth plane. I have 
already dealt with music in relation to the physique 
of the mind. Now we enter into the realm of music 
in reference to the spirit, the soul, that immortal part 
of you, the ego, which, through the change of physical 



THAT WHICH MUSIC TAUGHT ME 203 

death, maintains its identity, that part of me now 
speaking to you, and that vaguely remembers a physi- 
cal lif e such as all of you are now living. 

If I tell you that colour is the emotion of music, 
you will say: "How abstract, abstruse, poetical!" 
Yet in a very short time, the physicists of sound in 
the laboratories of the earth will discover that colour 
is the emotion of music. No one can define colour. 
They can say in finite language something about it. 
Some of the laws of colour we know. One of them is : 
There is no expression of colour where there is not 
the expression of some form of music. All life is the 
personal character of a cosmic vibration. All so- 
called inanimate and animate objects throw off a form 
of vibration, and this, as far as it is music, is colour, 
and is the only colour finite eyes have ever seen, or 
infinite eyes ever known. 

There are those living in the physical world who, 
hearing music, have seen colours, observed scenes, de- 
tected beautiful odours, or felt the warm touch of re- 
membered fingers as they caressed a fevered brow. 
If you are one who comes at this with a frown or a 
sneer, do not read on, but if you are sympathetic with 
the idea, follow me. Dear souls: music with infinite 
variation is the only energy, that can move in the 
atmosphere of the earth plane, which has the power 
instantly to transport you from the material environ- 
ment to the world of melody. No pure music was 
ever heard by the physical brain; supreme music is 
heard onlv by the soul. 

Music is the one expression of God's love which 
causes you to function actually on a higher plane 



204 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

without the necessity of physical sleep, and this before 
the soul has completely detached itself from the physi- 
cal body. The colours presented to your mind, the 
scenes you observe, the fragrances you detect, are 
what you see, feel, know when music has transported 
you from the earth plane to that definite stratum of 
beauty, the world of melody. 

Music is a great moral energy. Music has been, 
through all the ages, an indispensable auxiliary of re- 
ligious teaching. Prayers are songs. The poetical 
ideas of nobility express themselves in music. Wis- 
dom when uttered by an individual has a tone, a 
rhythm, a theme, so perfectly blended that such truth 
is music. Many have asked the question: "How 
did Jesus speak to the people?" One who was there 
and heard him said: "I was listening to music, yet 
I knew every word he said.'' This is true of all great 
human utterance. 

We are now entering that field of this theme where 
one realizes that one is ascending the steps of a temple 
to pray for strength and divine direction. We have 
said many times that earth is a school. We fail to 
understand why the priests and educationists of the 
earth plane have used mistaken methods. The theo- 
logical systems on the earth plane, reluctant as they 
are to admit it, have endeavoured to teach God's truth 
through fear and forced intellectual evidence. The 
time has come for the earth plane methods to be 
changed. 

A considerable amount of religion is taught a man 
through his emotion. This, then, through his love of 
beauty speaks reverently to his soul. Man is com- 



THAT WHICH MUSIC TAUGHT ME 205 

pletely employing his soul when he hears certain basic 
cosmic compositions of universal music such as Schu- 
bert's Omnipotence, his Ave Maria, Gounod's Ave 
Maria, Beethoven's Funeral March, his Moonlight 
Sonata, Chopin's Funeral March, his Polonaise; sev- 
eral hymns : Nearer, My God, to Thee, Lead, Kindly 
Light; the words and music of The Lost Chord, 
great folk songs, and some of the martial airs. 
All similar basic primal compositions, of which there 
are thousands, when played delightfully by some in- 
spired master of the harpsichord or violin, teach more 
of God than a century of intellectual sermons. They 
speak God to human emotions, then human emotion 
inevitably secures beauty in life, finds it — God speaks 
to the human soul. This is why music, hand in hand 
with religion, has walked down life's irregular aisle 
ever seeking the broad emancipated path. 

Music is the language of God. You ask how we 
speak here. We use no words; for the most part 
have our lips closed, and instantly make another know 
the depth of our thought. Music is a part of the 
atmosphere of every plane. You live in an environ- 
ment where music in abundance is everywhere. 
When we speak to another through the extension of 
thought to them, with such thinking we actually play 
on the strings of their consciousness a musical com- 
position of our ideas, so that the music within them be- 
comes the language of our unvoiced speech. 

I have said that music is the language of God. 
And so it is. It knows no arbitrary citizenship. It 
belongs to all the planes. Materialism reduced musi- 
cal thought and words to a discordancy ; consequently 



206 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

your earth plane language is sometimes the dullest 
thing to listen to. Love, light and spirit in language 
on the earth plane will gradually, through literature, 
poetry and music, restore human speech to a musical 
flow of expression. 

"Far-fetched," you say. Indeed, far-fetched. 
Fetched from a height that your age soon will reach 
if it be wise. It is time for souls on the earth plane 
to know that when one of you enters this world, and 
consciousness returns to you, then you are ushered 
into a new life-expression amid the sounds of music. 
People should die listening to music. Often great 
composers have requested in their last hours the play- 
ing of a favourite composition. 

Some day an inspired artist on the earth plane will 
immortalize himself and his age by painting this 
scene: a poorly furnished room; light entering only 
through one window; a violin in a corner of the room; 
an antique harpsichord near a bed; propped up on 
the bed, one with a large face, broad forehead, pure 
white silvery curls, large open eyes ebony black, 
rapturously gazing into the distance, the whole coun- 
tenance telling that this is for the master musician the 
hour of his death ; near by, seated on a stool, a youth 
with golden hair, playing a violin. Once I looked in 
on such a scene; saw one physically breathe his last 
to triumphant notes of hope and life as he was re- 
leased to the pulsating air. It was the happiest 
death-scene I know of. 

Music is the finite dipping and reaching, to the 
very farthest point humanly possible, into the infinite. 
t Then loved ones from the infinite reach down to the 



THAT WHICH MUSIC TAUGHT ME 207 

finite; they clasp hands, and so you are helped and 
directed along the path to the higher life. When one 
thinks of the music of the earth plane, and has a vision 
of people living by it and dying in it, and becomes 
aware that music is the divine point of contact be- 
tween the physical and the astral life, then one closes 
by saying: Now let me in silence bow my head and 
listen reverently to the loved ones on all the planes 
who are singing the joy of the deep and everlasting 
life. 

There shall be for every soul on the earth plane, 
while still dwelling in the physical habitation, some 
corner — a shrine place of communion where, when all 
other voices of guidance fail, the soul will still hear a 
tender refrain — that composition which is the sus- 
tenance of life. We call it hope. 
February 21, 1920. 



Souls of the Earth Plane: 

You are, very probably, thinking this moment, thought 
loved to immortality by minds that lived two thousand years 
ago. 



THE LITERATURE OF GOD 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

The greatest piece of literature extant is the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, and next to it are those love letters 
that lovers in all ages have written to lovers, and only- 
lovers have read. It is a fact, clear as a ray of light, 
that great literature has always left its greatness un- 
written, because literature is a limitation, and thought 
is without limitations. The literature of nations is 
an accurate gauge of their civilization. A great book 
is a universal monument. One can truly call the 
earth blest because the great writers of the earth plane 
have preserved and made permanent inspiration 
which sometimes came instantaneously from the heart 
of God, and other times required the history of ten 
centuries to make it apparent. As an educational, 
spiritual force, the libraries of the earth plane are the 
real universities because they are most democratic. 
They, more than any other influence, have en- 
gendered sanity, love, light, and have elevated the 
intelligence of the whole physical-spiritual world. 

I have said that your written, permanent, present 
literature is your greatest civilizing agency, and it is ; 
but written literature, compared with invisible litera- 
ture, is like a particle of powder off the tinted wing 
of a moth, contrasted with the iridescent, translucent 

209 



210 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

garment with which it is clothed. Shakespeare 
makes Hamlet say to Horatio : 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy." 

Just now let us confine ourselves to the earth and 
learn the invisible side, the esoteric inwardness, the 
real substance, of earth plane literature, which is not 
alone thought, words, composition, style, but is cosmic 
soul life which vibrates and lives within the more 
visible physical elements of prose and poetry. 

Dear Soul, you have had the experience of reading 
a verse or a paragraph that left you in a strange 
reverie. Your tone of thought was not at all the 
musical pitch of the line you had been reading. In- 
deed the psychology of literature demonstrates that 
it produces always opposite effects in the reader. 
You read of war and think of peace ; you read of love 
and think of hate; you read of beauty and say: "It 
is a dream. There is no beauty." Why is this? It 
is because visible literature, that which is physical, 
is like the physical body in which the author lived, 
and if you meet him, usually you are disappointed. 
Why? Because there is a depth, a collation of 
cosmic, harmonic notes whose echoes are visible litera- 
ture, and only by knowing the law can you pass from 
the room of echoes into the dream-vault from which 
emanate the strong literary voices of the masters. 

Each soul born is destined by the Divine to be a 
new volume of love and graphic delineation, so that 
the earth plane literature may be so wisely diversified 
that the God in you alone is the common measure 



THE LITERATURE OF GOD 211 

of relationship. But that expression of the Deity- 
through you is one infinitely varied, for variation is 
nature's way of endlessly creating. As it is true of 
a man, so is it true of literature. The man in his 
physical literature writes to you about his experience. 
The Divine, through that same literature, tells you 
about the universe. Earth plane literature, then, is 
like a glass lens constructed by the hands of man. 
In the measure of its perfection it focuses divine light 
which becomes a line of directed illumination along 
which God's emissaries of inspiration find ingress to 
your essential self. 

The imperative need on the earth plane at present 
is not so much a greater and different literature, as it 
is a people gifted with the knowledge of how to ex- 
tract, through your literature, all the husbanded gold 
held in trust for those who know how to delve into 
such rich literary soil. My purpose, then, is to in- 
struct you how to use visible literature so cosmically 
that it shall become an invisible saviour ministering 
to your most compelling want. The instructions 
flow out of my visible thought to you, my invisible 
and visible friends, as the visibility of God traverses 
the evening sky. An evening sky is a poem. It is 
heaven's canvas upon which twilight and love paint 
eternal hope, where at last we can find refuge from 
the disintegrating effects of a materialistic world. 

There is only one way to read visible literature for 
its invisible substance, and that is to study your own 
mood before you read a line. In reading literature 
for education you are in the court of the sacred 
temple, and your act is replete with a consequence 



212 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

that knows no measure. My brother, when you read 
be alone. Physically, be at ease. Read only that 
which is worthy. Then know that in this sincere 
form of reading, the most ideal method of attracting 
inspiration is being employed by you. This is what 
ensues. Your soul in the process of reading is 
cognizing the thought of one who wrote for another 
who is you. That is the first step to God, because it 
is an eternal act. This eternal act makes you recep- 
tive to communication with the soul of the author, 
whether that soul be homed in a physical or in an 
astral body, and that is a cosmic step. 

Being in communication with the author and he 
with you, then absolutely controlled by his positive 
thought and your negative receptivity, you become 
an open, divinely-endowed and sensitive attracting 
field of consciousness which now can dram from all 
the planes the highest thoughts and most compre- 
hensive inspirations; for visible literature is a divine 
method of inducing quietude, serenity, attunement 
in you, so that invisible literature, which is inspira- 
tion, creates, while you read, the atmosphere in which 
you function. 

You have followed me thus far. We take a higher 
step. Literature has only one standard by which to 
be judged, that is by its effect. The greatest litera- 
ture is that which has become the proverbs of the peo- 
ple. The literature which the Divine loves is that 
which the sons of earth have memorized. What is 
the law of truth surcharging all this? It is: All liter- 
ature which you read with your physical eye is spoken 
to your consciousness by your voice, and you think 



THE LITERATURE OF GOD 213 

erroneously that to read to yourself without the 
physical voice is the best plan. I tell you, my friend, 
that if you do not learn better now, it is a tragedy. 
The truth in visible literature becomes the wisdom of 
invisible literature if the voice of the author is audible 
in your voice reading aloud. Only then is there a 
marriage between the logos of the author's thought 
and your citizenship within the country of that logos. 
Great literature has a music of its own. It teaches 
through this music. Unless you sing the refrain and 
know the motif of the author's song, you are simply 
caught in a storm of disorganized words. 

It has been known on the earth plane for ages that 
literature is a method of suggestion and could never 
be a system of completion and exhaustion of thought 
or inspiration. Knowledge is a fact. Literature is 
only a suggesting and directing force. It is for us 
to determine, then, how literature suggests and to 
what it directs. Literature suggests, above all, the 
type of mind of the man who reads. It suggests al- 
ways, that, of itself, it has become a consciousness in 
that you may share another's experience within the 
world of his thought. To what does literature direct ? 
Always to idealism. You would not read a great 
novel, feel the spell of an epic, join hands with the 
Divine within the sacred circle of eloquence, unless all 
these forms of visible literature directed you towards 
the ideal. A Bible is a great force, religion a greater 
still, but the greatest power of all is the religion of 
the Bible in your own heart. Literature is the only 
true democracy, for literature is nothing unless it be- 
longs to all. Only that within yourself — the Bible 



214 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

of the religion within you — which comprehends that 
which the author directs you to realize, is to you a 
literature of consequence. This invisible correspond- 
ent literature within yourself is the only permanent 
literature, for it is the universe. 

My teaching is that great literature is not a thing 
apart. It has no individualistic ego of its own at all. 
Though elemental, it knows not one ingredient of 
selfishness, for it realizes, then, that it is only the 
strings; you are the violin; and the Divine is the 
Musician who calls from your well of being those 
fluidic notes of life which the Master Musician loves 
to draw from His children, as a father speaking to 
his child. 

You believe in the conservation of energy^ and you 
say I must. Thought is a form of energy, and there 
is such a thing as the conservation of inspired thought. 
Your earth called it a tragedy when the Alexandrian 
Library was swept flameward to ruin. Your his- 
torians have lamented the loss of all those priceless 
volumes. In the universe there is no such thing as 
the destruction of anything divinely important. 
There is a conservation of thought. I will tell you 
where it is. Neither the Alexandrian nor any other 
library of thought that was worth the preservation 
by nature was lost. 

Let me explain to you the economy of the plane 
of humanly minted thought that remains, growing 
ever purer until its services are requested, when it 
steps grandly forth. The old theological idea of a 
solemn book of record, with the Divine as a book- 
keeper, had just a tinge of truth in it, for every 



THE LITERATURE OF GOD 215 

worthy thought — which means the shaping and sculp- 
turing of your inspiration by the artist ringers of your 
life — is the part you play in the thought that is used 
by all mankind. Thought, so manipulated, knows 
no age or race or clime ; it is immortal. You, Reader, 
are very probably thinking this moment thought 
loved to immortality by minds that lived two thou- 
sand years ago. 

You live in a world of ideas contributed by every 
human being that ever lived and v thought. These 
ideas, refined as life by the Divine, became the re- 
corded facts of nature. Every thought, with the ex- 
ception of the still-born or aborted, not having 
reached the personality of an idea, evermore remains 
in your world to be encountered by all who come after 
you. This is the great invisible literature in the 
library of the universe. 

Each man and woman is an author, and you never 
know what invisible novel, epic, drama, your life is 
writing in the realm of the invisible world. Here I 
leave you with the responsibility placed on your life 
so perfectly that you dare not be less than the Divine 
intended you to be, and I know you will not be less. 
So spake truth through me as I read a page of in- 
visible literature for you. 

January 31, 1920. 



NEOLOGISM 

The Art of Making Words 
Samuel Taylor Coleeidge 

Feeling that the Revelation should not be pub- 
lished without a reference to the growth of the earth 
plane language, I call the attention of thoughtful 
men to the importance of a pure language, and one 
extensive enough to express a great number of new 
experiences which will make your age the renaissance 
of ideas. An age has sometimes been halted by lack 
of words to state important conceptions, facts and 
conclusions. The science of making new words is 
called "neologism." It should be made an art, and 
&t once. Some of the great minds of the earth plane 
should study the need of the widening of expression 
of thought, and make common property of the vehicles 
to carry that thought into every receptive mind. 

During the course of the communication of the 
revelation contained in this book, we have been halted 
momentarily in the careful statement of our teach- 
ing by the limitations of your language. We could 
not, for instance, find a word that, with positive ex- 
actitude, and in a perfectly balanced way, stated the 
idea of a combination of feminine and masculine 
qualities, so we made a word and described these 
qualities as "femastic." One of the members of the 

216 



NEOLOGISM 217 

inner circle, being instructed to invent new words, 
described the peculiar and unique temperament of 
the Irish people as it rises to a passion of devotion to 
their native land as "Erinian." That word should 
live. Finding need of a word to describe the earth 
plane as one that is evolving away from matter into 
a spiritual plane, I found issuing from my inspiration 
the word "spirith," meaning the spirit-earth, the earth 
as a spiritual sphere, the earth minus its physical 
significance. Heraclitus and Sir William Crookes 
mentioned a significant atmospheric gas never as yet 
referred to by the earth plane physicists, which is of 
a purely psychic nature. We have realized that it is 
the food of inspiration and exaltation, and so Hera- 
clitus invented a word for use on the earth plane in 
which victory and exaltation are clearly designated 
when he calls this psychic gas "avic" or a victory. 

If in the birth of words throughout the ages, both 
circumstances and the authors of words had been 
more naturally directed, language would long ago 
have reached that status to which it must ultimately 
develop before it is a worthy medium of human think- 
ing and divine inspiration. A great language is a 
collation of ample words, with sufficient puristic tone, 
with no loss of robustness. The thought of peda- 
gogues and linguists has been to form a new and 
simple language that all the earth could utilize. This 
is too complicated a task ever to be accepted as an in- 
vention made by one generation. A great language 
makes itself. 

A new language will come to the peoples of the 
earth in time, made principally from the potentiality 



218 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

contained within all earth plane languages. So the 
omens in your sky are benign. Therefore invent new 
and powerful words of expression, for each one of 
them will become a giant warrior despatching to the 
oblivion of disuse scores of inferior and weak words. 
A word is a power, a collection of words a force, an 
accumulation of such forces, an irresistible energy 
which in time makes the deepest ideas the clear 
atmosphere of thought in which humanity lives. 
March 22, 1920. 

A valued member of the inner circle, Dr. Ed- 
ward Fidlar, having read this chapter, suggested, in 
collaboration with the reporter, a further thought and 
an original word, which, being read to me by the re- 
porter, was so much in harmony with the teaching 
herein enunciated that I quote his remarks verbatim: 

"It is evident that a word is necessary to convey 
the teachings embodied in this book. We have at- 
tempted this in the term, unimantheism. It is to con- 
vey the idea of God, man, and the universe as one. 
As these make a corporate whole whose individual 
cells we are, it will be manifest that no one personality 
nor group of personalities can arrogate to themselves 
that of which they are only a part. The highest 
functioning of the individual, with harmonious co- 
operation and intercommunication of all individuals, 
is implied. 



VEILED PAIN 

William Shakespeare 

Let us utter praise to the heavens because of pain. 
Send we to the skies our gratitude because of dark 
clouds and storms. The canopied earth meets the 
shock of heaven's hammer-blows when nature seems 
to be torn asunder by the capricious unthinking will 
of a God whose love is not as large as that of men. 

'Tis the same with man's poor puny distrustful life 
when looked at in the mirror of inferior reflecting 
material. Half the world is a mirror of inferior 
image-showing merit. So you lose the inclination to 
see yourselves in the mirror of your actions, and man 
then for a time struts the boards of the world stage, 
a hypocritical soul in the disguise of mock heroics. 
This is the contumely that arises to satirize those who 
were too vain and dark-minded to learn that each 
man was planned by the Divine as an artist to make 
the world-earth beautiful by his life. 

The old earth should have centrally caught, in the 
stretch of centuries, tragedies of epical moment. 
There must be, so that the arm of history develop all 
its proportionate muscles, the occasional tragedy ; but 
the most sinful tragedy I know of is that nearly all 
the lives of those on the earth plane have been 
tragedies. The frequency of a thing is its disaster. 

Heaven desires that there be but few tragical lives 

219 



220 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

in a whole world-population of lives whose thoughts, 
being beautiful, arch themselves o'er all, a rainbow 
of love, character, religion and beauty. 
February 20, 1920. 



The universe is an enormous press, capable both of com- 
pression and release. Universal power concentrates energy 
into each unformed particle, with all the force of all the 
worlds. This mono-atom then forever thrills with release 
of life which flows unceasingly from this centre of all energy. 

April 25, 1920. r-Galileo 



THE MONOATOM 

William Crookes 

One reading the writings of any of the modern 
philosophers, or enjoying their works collectively, 
must have been impressed by a powerful force that 
seemed to be urging the philosophic mind towards 
one supreme conception. Philosophers as far apart 
as Immanuel Kant and Benedict Spinoza, neverthe- 
less, seemed to be on firm ground when their work 
approached simplicity. The whole philosophy of 
Kant may be summed up in one of his own con- 
clusions: "All knowledge is based on experience." 
The same is true with Spinoza. "The universe and 
all that the universe is — and it is all — is one." This 
is Spinoza's present original critique of his earth 
plane philosophy. 

I have said that the urge of the multifarious and 
multitudinous thought in modern philosophy was 
towards simplicity. But the experience of it was 
complex for the reason that since the days of Pythag- 
oras, Plato, Aristotle, the human mind, saved by 
inspiration alone, has looked intellectually upon the 
universe as an unfathomable complexity. Intel- 
lectuality is wrong; inspiration is right. Now I 
know that the universe is a monoatom, and that all 
other phases of universal life are but expressions of 
the life of the monoatom. This being so, we enter 

223 



224 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the two great fundamental realms of matter and 
super-matter to consider the age-long question of 
what is the difference between the physical and the 
spiritual. This is our subject. 

Let me state with as close an approximation as the 
language of your earth plane permits, what we in the 
astral world understand physical matter to be. 
Physical matter is matter because it has certain 
properties such as density, weight, mass, and solidity, 
and is the crudest form of that substantial^ solidified 
energy of which the universe is composed. Why 
have I said "energy"? Because matter is a form of 
motion, and energy is matter in motion. 

There are places in the universe where matter and 
motion do not exist. We call them here "the void 
places," the absolutely empty spaces found among 
the group of the constituents of both the matter of 
terra firma and the super-matter of the spiritual 
world. 

What is super-matter? It is the real, actual, con- 
crete element out of which the spiritual world is com- 
posed. We, here in the astral world, have divided 
matter, the one basic substance in the universe. The 
physicist of the physical world takes atmospheric air 
and, roughly speaking, divides it into nitrogen, 
oxygen, hydrogen, argon, neon, crypton, carbon di- 
oxide and, probably, another gas or two. But, in 
the sense of the definition that I have employed, air, 
water, earth, may be roughly termed matter, and 
matter is just as susceptible to division and sub- 
division as any of the expressions of the one basic sub- 
stance out of which all things are built. 



THE MONOATOM 225 

I said all things are built. I mean by that that 
matter is a framework — the bonds and bricks of a 
house. Matter is substantially that which acts as the 
solidified boundary which retains and contains a some- 
thing else. Matter is a boundary on all the planes. 
When viewed in the light of the earth plane atom, 
matter is the boundary, the law which substantially 
holds in a universal relationship the imaged universe 
which exists in reduced form within the boundaries of 
the atom. 

I have spoken of the properties of matter. What 
of the use of matter? The principal use of matter on 
all the planes is to act as a line of distinguishment 
and demarcation between the various elements and 
the different compounds. Without matter, then, ele- 
ments and compounds would be so commingled that 
chaos would rule and there could be no God. 

Another use of matter is to act as an ascending 
scale towards reality. It is a lower rung on the 
ladder, the first step on the stairway, and as you walk 
up each step, the rarefied quality of the matter be- 
comes more pronounced, and so the possibilities of 
consciousness enlarge beyond the compass of a world 
that would swing around all the worlds. 

Spiritual matter, strange as it may seem, is the 
internal reverse side of physical matter. Death is 
simply changing consciousness so that you pass over 
the wall of matter from the external unfinished side 
to the internal and somewhat more finished side, and 
there encounter something else. This something else 
is hardly susceptible of expression in finite language, 
nevertheless, I will make the attempt. 



226 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Mystics and seers have spoken from time im- 
memorial about ultimate loss of personal ego-identity 
by being dissolved into the immensity of God. All 
astral souls realize that that poetical conception con- 
tains a germ of truth. Momentary loss of the sense 
of individuality (as, recognized by self as an ego) is 
the ultimate development which is indispensable to 
the growth of intelligence. In the physical world 
you cling to matter as a form of discipline, a proba- 
tion, and wisely, for the reason that the law of self- 
preservation concentrates you into an individuality 
that rarely knows the freedom of growth. But 
when, through death, you are released and step over 
to the other side of matter, you rind it possible while 
still retaining individuality to transcend time, dis- 
tance, and all the subsidiary earth plane qualities of 
selfishness, fear, avarice, sensuality. 

The only quality which you retain in the after life 
precisely as you were in possession of it in the physi- 
cal life is love. Living then in a world of super- 
matter, we are but little affected by gravity, we do 
not know what time means. Such is immortality. 
We here are superior to matter. Yet the laws of 
matter, in the sense of the forming of composites of 
intelligence into a spiritual life-form, hold good. 
That is the use of spiritual matter. 

Now, let us deal with the question of physical space. 
Physical space is an actual void, a perfect vacuum, 
an emptiness, and it is located between the different 
gases and the various molecules. It is the space that 
is the principal ingredient of an atom. One might 
jcall it a perfect hole in the universe. It has a thou- 



THE MONOATOM 227 

sand differentiations from matter, but the principal 
one is that while matter is an energy, the void or space 
is the complete absence of all energy. The question 
arises : What is its use ? 

Homely must be the illustration with which I 
demonstrate the use of the perfect void or complete 
space in nature. It is obvious that gases unless con- 
fined in some way are somewhat useless. There is a 
boundary retaining and containing all physical and 
spiritual forms of energy, and that boundary is per- 
fect space. Nothing can pass or penetrate it. It is 
an immovable, impenetrable wall, the most perfect 
form of solidity science will ever discover. In a 
homely way it is the great lever by which all mixtures, 
compounds, energies, forces and elements use and 
exert their particular powers in the expression of 
their life. It is like a man backed up against a wall 
fighting for his life. The wall is the element of 
strength, and deeper still, it is the contactual wall 
against which ether presses and moves in order to 
produce all such energies as atoms and electrons. 

It must be apparent to every enquiring mind that 
if survival is a fact and the intelligence called the 
soul lives, it must live as a person and in a world 
associating with people. That carries with it the ob- 
vious necessity of possessing a body by which to ob- 
tain personal form. If we are persons then, living in 
a world, what do we breathe ? That is also a question 
at once to the fore. We breathe air. We do not 
breathe the same air that you do in the physical world, 
but we do breathe an atmosphere, a little of which 
oozes through to your plane, and is employed by you 



228 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

for all psychic and kindred purposes, such as art, in- 
vention, science-investigation, literature, philosophy 
and religion. 

The air of the astral world has an outstanding char- 
acteristic. It controls the degree of consciousness 
we employ as we use it in lesser or greater quantities. 
It is composed of many gases, only one of which you 
possess, and in the most infinitesimal degree. That 
gas is argon. The emanations from argon are a com- 
bination of the gases of the astral world which we 
term "avic." This avic was the food that Jesus re- 
ferred to when he said: "I have meat to eat that 
ye know not of." There is a relation between the 
physical and the spiritual world systems. It is main- 
tained across a field of vital contact. This field is 
the atmosphere of the astral world finding entrance 
into the physical world through the door of the gas 
called argon. 

Argon is present in the atmosphere of your world 
in exactly a double quantity as compared with that 
erroneous belief entertained at present by the earth 
plane physicists. The proof of this fact will be made 
evident just the moment when the emanation of argon 
that we call avic is isolated, weighed and liquefied, by 
the serious investigators of the earth plane. 

It is conceded, I think, that a heaven-world is a 
great improvement on the world of physical matter. 
This is principally because of the different food and 
air we absorb and breathe. But the most important 
matter to treat of is the effect of astral air on human 
beings as released to your world through emanations 
from argon. It is conceded likewise, I think, that 



THE MONOATOM 229 

most of your great inventions and discoveries have 
been the result of inspiration (to breathe in; to in- 
spire). The sending station of inspiration to the 
finite mind is always avic, that gas which emanates 
from argon, and which, in its reaction in human be- 
ings, results in a form of exhilaration to the conscious- 
ness which gives to your world all the results of 
genius in every realm of knowledge. 

Avic is present, importantly so, in the atmosphere 
of your world. A poet is impressed by the beauty 
and truth of his conception. He thinks deeply, or, in 
other words, transcends intellectuality, and because 
respiration and thinking are synchronized, he employs 
avic and writes a great poem. This is true of all high 
human achievement. It is infinitely true in the love 
relationship between human beings. In that case, 
because of understanding and sympathy, of the some- 
what negative nature of the woman, physically speak- 
ing, conjoined to the more positive nature of the 
physical man, of the attunement of their nervous 
systems, and the blending of their intellectual facul- 
ties, they function then as one soul; they think, 
breathe, live, guided by inspiration. They breathe 
avic. Physically, they become actually young and 
beautiful. That's why it is said: "All mankind 
loves a lover." 

Gravitation 

The teaching of the physicist in the material world 
of the physical sphere in reference to gravitation is 
sound as far as it goes. I stress the observation that 
gravitation is a much more vital force in the universe 



230 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

than it is possible for the finite mind to comprehend. 
Gravitation is not so much a pull — an external force 
acting from some high power station, as an immense 
lever by which to exert an attraction. Gravitation 
is absolutely, in its native, pure, uncontaminated 
state, affinity and attraction. The well-known law 
that matter has an attraction for matter and is only 
limited by the distance between objects hardly con- 
veys the truth that gravitation is the attraction of one 
element for another element at a distance, through the 
power of the correlation of affinity. 

Some great scientific minds have thought that 
gravitation was a stupendous invisible wire or cable 
reaching usually from the sun in the solar system, 
and because of being connected with a million objects 
in the physical world, exerting the power of gravita- 
tion. There is just a faint film of truth in such an 
idea. Gravitation is an actual element, a form of the 
one basic substance of which the universe is composed. 
But it has this peculiar character worthy of the most 
minute note. Gravitation is a connection between 
all permanent actual real bodies and objects in the 
universe. Do not make the mistake of thinking that 
there can be no such thing as a disconnected connec- 
tion. The connecting of object with object and mass 
with mass is one of the most wonderful things that 
we know anything about in this higher world. Gravi- 
tation might be described as an arm with a hand 
reaching out from a quantity of matter so as to grasp 
another hand that has reached out from a larger mass 
so that all things in the universe can be connected. 
I have said there can be such a thing as discon- 



THE MONOATOM 231 

nection pursuant to conformity with the simile I have 
used. Detached portions of planets flying chaotic- 
ally in space are an example, but the greatest ex- 
ample of all, and the most vital, is that of disorgan- 
ized thought not controlled by the normality of the 
gravitation of the human mind. When the earth 
plane psychologists began to understand just a little 
about human thought, they suspected that thinking, 
and what thinking is composed of, might be both an 
external and an internal production. They were 
right. It is both. There is a certain form of gravi- 
tation between the thought that belongs to the human 
mind and the thing thought about. I am using this 
for the purpose of extending it into the realm of so- 
called inanimate matter as well as animated matter, 
for this reason. Every object in the universe, be- 
cause it has a definite form by which it can be recog- 
nized, has therefore a consciousness. This applies to 
physical things as low as those which have only one 
cell, and up through the mineral, vegetable and ani- 
mal kingdoms; and this consciousness — a form of 
recognition however minute, that an object has for 
an object, a person for a person, a soul for the uni- 
verse — this consciousness is gravitation, connection, 
attraction, affinity, which holds all things in the joint 
relationship of an harmonious universe. 

The proof of this is singular. It has to do with 
the great law of correspondence. There must be 
something in each consciousness that corresponds 
with everything in the universe. Else you could 
not know anything about the universe. That is 
why physical man possesses in some degree every 



232 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

ingredient which is represented in the physical world. 
I mean by that to say that you would not know 
minerals if there were not some of the mineral 
represented in you. Your relation to them would 
be negative if they were not in you. Your con- 
sciousness is made up of affinity which means the 
attraction of like for like which exists between you 
and the world in which you live. 

Why is this so? Because the law of gravitation, 
both in the physical and in the spiritual world, finds 
the centre of gravity in the soul of man. There must 
be, obviously, a direct connection between each in- 
dividualized consciousness and all the world in which 
it lives. The reason is that to each man his con- 
sciousness is the whole world. Let those who doubt 
this suppress consciousness by means of an anaesthetic. 
They will know, when consciousness returns, that 
they have, for the time, disconnected themselves from 
their world. We take a larger step now. This is 
another principle of cosmic gravitation. 

Gravitation is overcome by only one thing in any 
world, — by consciousness. I mean actually over- 
come. How? In the introductory paragraphs of 
this chapter, I have made it clear, I hope, that there 
are actual voids, holes, in so-called space. These 
voids, I have stated, divide the space between the 
electrons, atoms, molecules, and rare gases. They 
are the lines along the surface of which thought trav- 
els without impediment, without being subjected to 
gravitation,, and ranges all the universe, touching any 
consciousness in the universe, and even, in a spirit- 
ual way, sending along such lines of travel, finite and 



THE MONOATOM 233 

infinite thought to the supreme consciousness of all — 
God. 

Electricity 

Arriving here in the laboratory of the astral world, 
the great delight of my life was to enquire what the 
scientific minds here knew about electricity. This is 
what I have learned. Electricity is neither a fluid 
nor a solid ; it is something different. It is an emana- 
tion. There are two kinds of electricity extant — 
positive and negative. Positive electricity is pro- 
duced by the physical world as it revolves in the ether 
and the substratum of atmospheric air which revolves 
with the rolling sphere of earth which might be called 
a great generating battery. It generates through 
contactual process, as it revolves, one element for 
which I must now coin a new word. Call it "trula," 
an element not yet even suspected by the earth plane 
physicist, but which will be discovered in your cen- 
tury. 

Perhaps the most realistic form of the expression 
of this element generated by the earth, which through 
affinity results in positive electricity is that observed 
in great sheets of lightning, the discharge of a 
Crookes tube, and the emanations of radium. For 
there is a physically invisible super-electronic atom 
beyond the electron, which is positive electricity. 
This, when generated by the earth, is released in 
various ways. It does not become electricity as you 
commonly use it until, through affinity, it mingles 
with a field of super-energy which combination results 
in the emanation you call electricity. 



234 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

What is an emanation? That which is radiated or 
thrown off, say, by radium or helium, might be called 
an emanation. An emanation in every case is the 
single cell of an atom, through pragmatic utilization, 
opening and throwing out its most intense energy 
which has this peculiar characteristic, that while it 
contains some of the same matter as the atom, never- 
theless, it is totally different in its major aspects from 
the parent atom. In the emanation, the law of gravi- 
tation is reaching out from an isolated atom into a 
particular field of basic primal energy, the true home- 
land of the energy contained within the atom. Each 
particle out of which an emanation is composed has 
an expanding and an explosive power which is at- 
tracted by a field of gas, the one element which alone 
pulls the emanation in the direction of the develop- 
ment of its most infinitesimal maturity. In other 
words, it is an offspring recognizing the parents to 
whom it belongs, and being received home for higher 
use. 

Electricity is an emanation given off exactly at that 
point of contact where physical matter loses physical 
properties and becomes spiritual. Let me employ a 
homely illustration of a grand idea. The first elec- 
tricity was produced through friction by rubbing 
amber on cloth. This is a very crude illustration of 
what I have discovered in this world to be the truth. 
Electricity is produced by the revolving of the physi- 
cal world, just where it touches the spiritual world 
which is revolving in a different direction. I do not 
mean to say that electricity is produced in vast quan- 
tities in a contactual way. I do say, though, that 



THE MONOATOM 235 

the physical element called trula is played upon by its 
psychical field of attraction which lies just beyond 
the physical world, and the emanation resulting is 
electricity. 

A further study of electrons will reveal that these 
infinitely small atoms — for they are atoms, each of 
them a world with a solar system of its own — are the 
thin partition that lies between the visible physical 
world and the invisible (to the physical eye) psychic 
world. This brings us to astral thought in reference 
to atomic energy, which we might better call 

Electronic Energy 

What do I mean by energy? Energy is a power 
which can be used by man to divert, control and trans- 
form the laws of strength so as to make a given en- 
vironment a happy abode for the soul to function in. 
Energy is that which controls motion. Then super- 
energy might be termed the great controlling system 
of the universe, whose principal object is to control 
lesser energies. 

The Universe is regulated by two forms of energy, 
diffused energy and controlled energy. Controlled 
energy is imprisoned force. Within certain limits, 
energy is too powerful to be controlled at all. That 
is why it is energy. But when, of its own volition, 
it enters matter, it can be controlled. Energy enter- 
ing matter exercises a proclivity which causes it to 
constrict, contract, concentrate; and while it is doing 
this, it becomes more powerful. It is a wound up 
spring, and when wound, most effective. There is 
a superabundance of energy wound up in the atom, 



236 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

whose force the human mind will never fathom. 

Six months after the opening of hostilities in the 
great war, there died in Germany an obscure and un- 
known research worker. He had discovered the 
method of exploding atoms. . . . The day arrived 
when the discovery was to be handed to the authori- 
ties — on that very day the obscure scientist was killed 
in his laboratory by a small premature explosion. 
Perhaps nature killed him to protect herself. Who 
knows ? 

The moment the earth plane physicist learns how to 
tap the atom, and, in an absolutely controlled way, 
draw from it its energy, then the power of the Falls 
of Niagara becomes as insignificant in comparison 
as the weight of a leaf falling from the limb of a tree. 
But even here do not restrict yourself. Enormous 
energies are stored, not only in atoms, molecules and 
electrons, but in a combination through affinity of 
all these. That is why they all exist to be com- 
panions in strength for the ever onward urge of a 
world that is journeying now from its infancy of ideas 
into a robust manhood. 
April 24, 1920. 



INCIDENTAL OBSERVATIONS 

William Crookes 

Weight is direction. Nothing has weight unless 
gravitation presses it in one uniform direction. 

All substance is drawn in an easterly direction in a 
cosmic sense. God has put but one constant power 
in the universe. With its use all intelligence can di- 
rect and assist itself. 

The most fluid of all permanency is music. It has 
a direct correspondence to water. Matter is dormant 
life. 

A thing itself is never great. It is only its emana- 
tions. 

It is almost impossible to know what is meant by 
the physical, for the physical is only the other side 
of the spiritual and both are related. They are the 
two sides of life. 

Chemistry is one note of substance of which there 
are so many mathematics cannot count them. 

Every thing has the power to create. It is the 
author of its own emanations. 

The passage of matter through matter is the pass- 
ing of the solidity and space of one mass of matter 
through the space-region of another mass of matter. 
Space is susceptible of condensation and concentra- 
tion. 

237 



238 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Inspiration is the rhythm between thinking and 
respiration. 

A human being is the pole or axis of a whirlpool 
of rushing energies, and retains youth in exact ratio to 
his assimilation of these energies in correspondence 
with the activity of finite and infinite consciousness. 
Eighty per cent of old age is self ^induced through 
laziness. The aged grow tired, lean out of the 
vertical position and are disintegrated by the whirl- 
ing forces that tear them down. 

The passive state is a combination of an equal 
quantity of the positive and the negative. 

Matter is dormant life. In it the universal basic 
substance is compressed and confined in the potential 
state. Life contradistinguished from matter is the 
universal basic substance all active. The difference 
between the spiritual and the physical is the difference 
between the higher and the lower planes. 

People will be increasingly aware of the thoughts 
of others. The most dangerous and, at the same 
time, the most divine act is to think. Thinking is 
never done in secret. 



"MEDITATION IS TWILIGHT 
PRAYER" 

Nature is forced sometimes so to exhaust the phys- 
ical body that the individual must seek rest away from 
the turmoil of material activity. This is the way the 
Divine makes it possible for the soul, while the body 
is resting, to recuperate during hours of meditation 
with the universe. 

If each individual would spend a few moments 
daily in meditating — allowing the soul to float calmly 
with the current of life as it circles the worlds of the 
spirit, doing this without effort, as gently as a child 
sleeps, there would be far less physical sickness and 
distress in your world. Then would come at once a 
generation of cosmic beings, strong because they had 
learned how to commune with God in the beauty of 
prayer which is meditation. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 



239 



MEDITATIONS 

Father, and the Love that is in lif e, we prayed for 
guidance and Thou hast guided. We are at home 
wherever we are, when we know, O God, that thy 
home is all the universe, where the doors of hospitality 
are all open wide asking us to enter and rest awhile. 
Father, Thou art a shrine, a God of healing, who 
makest very clear thy purpose when we invite Thee, 
for that is what is meant by faith. 

Father, the earth is still a weary place where mil- 
lions of Thy children sincerely struggle with brain 
and thought to explain Thy way. Father, inspire 
them to cease their struggling, and to know that the 
sacred things of strength are those which are silently 
at rest. Vision their faltering steps to march as 
notes of music which make up the chord of a 
celestial anthem. Give them to know that sympathy, 
gentleness of voice, desire and meditation, are the 
paths that lead to the entrance of Thine abode. 

Father, teach the children of the earth the way of 
purification. Tell them through Thy words that 
purification is to think love to another who through 
their effort becomes purified by their lif e ; and finally, 
God of Love, reveal to Thy children that because 
Thou art a great and mighty God, Thou art gentle 
and loving. Amen. 

John Henry Newman. 

240 



MEDITATIONS 241 

Let me in silence rest awhile, nor think a thought 
nor dream an idea. Here I place myself in the 
scheme of things where I become weak as a day-old 
babe. If I move, I move as air, when a bird is flying. 
Now is the time for me to breathe as softly as does 
nature in the stillest moment of her life. Now is the 
period for a few moments when unruffled, almost un- 
touched, by the simplest effort of self-life, I am in an 
attitude to be impressed by God's thought in this par- 
ticular form which is lovelier than a lily, more beauti- 
ful than the touch of higher consciousness, so quiet 
that sounds the spirit sense alone perceives are not 
heard. 

My meditation now, Father divine, is an attitude 
of forgetfulness into Thy eternal all-inclusive being. 
Amen. 

Samuel Wilbekforce. 



242 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Father, we who are Thy children realize that there 
come moments in an individual's and a nation's life 
when the individual and the nation both, in order to 
be understood, should express their desire in measured 
terms, deliberate and powerful. This prayer is for 
the nations. 

Father, there be those on the earth plane, inspired 
men of God, who know that if the earth plane does 
not now accept mighty legislation born from Thy 
thought, then does the earth plane crucify oppor- 
tunity. Give them wisdom to know that now is the 
time for the nations to league themselves together 
in one purpose, that of the abolition of war. 

Father, some have endured the blood-sweat to learn 
this truth, that when the earth plane nations are 
leagued together so that war is abolished, then and 
only then the earth plane economic system becomes 
an instrument of justice which will evolve rapidly into 
ethical laws which make possible the teaching of the 
Sermon on the Mount. Amen. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 



MEDITATIONS 243 

I think of the fatherhood and motherhood in God, 
and then I think no more. My meditation is a 
knowledge. I know, Father, that man on the earth 
plane is the only expression of Thyself that frets and 
worries and is sorely troubled. I know that if I were 
to go back to my earth plane home, with my heaven 
plane knowledge, I oftentimes would be divinely seri- 
ous, but never again would I have a heart of pain, 
an agonized soul, nor feel the lacerations of bereave- 
ment. I know that I would not, Father, because the 
soul never dies. When it changes from one body to 
another, it is always for a better body-home in which 
to dwell, not permanently, but until that home is too 
small a habitation; then, through the birth of death, 
it will find always a cleaner, larger house in which 
to live the life of advancement. 

I know that I am strong when I ask no indulgence ; 
that Thou art near when I am where music is, and 
flowers grow, and children laugh, and men and women 
play in the serious hours of their work. My medita- 
tion does not permit me to ask why these things are 
so. I only meditate. 

When in the silent room alone, they read this medi- 
tation, quiet in thought, though the body and brain 
are not asleep, only the will, then may they find the 
tired brain healed, the diseased body well again, and 
the soul uplifted in one undying prayer to God who 
is Love forever and forever. Amen! 

Maey Youle Watson. 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE MINDS 
THROUGH ONE SOUL 

The chapter which follows was communicated on 
February eighth, nineteen twenty, in the presence of 
several members of the Inner Circle. As it was all 
reported in long-hand, it required one hundred and 
thirty minutes to receive it. The first thirty-three 
messages were received in sixty-six minutes, the re- 
maining twenty-two, after an intermission of ten min- 
utes, in fifty-four minutes. 

Had the paragraphs received all been trivial non- 
sense, the various styles would still have made the 
performance a remarkable one. 

Mary Youle Watson: Every child is born from 
the heart of God. 

Hubbard: Your earth has ordered and received 
a new religion compounded of work, love and joy. 

Mozart: Music is God's peace and joy. It is 
the lullaby of His rest. 

Coleridge: Consciousness is physical life pene- 
trated with intelligence. 

Matthew Arnold: Intellectual debris has now 
been cleared away. The new age is a clean sheet, and 
on it your inventors, physicists, scientists, litterateurs, 
are just beginning to write a true philosophy. 

Anonymous: Memory, to all of us, makes some 
portion of the earth plane a heaven, remembering 

244. 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 245 

the friendships that were ours in the physical life. 

Socrates: All the ages down to the present were 
questions. Now you are beginning to receive the 
answer. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe: There is a faith 
known as mother love. It is a form of divine in- 
tuition. Never is it in error nor does it fail. That 
is why every mother is a heroine. 

Shelley: Adonais (Keats' Art) sleeps on the 
earth plane, but soon your sense of justice will vibrate 
to his awakening. Then you will greet and know 
him. 

Sappho: God ofttimes is so much in love with 
His creation, that, like a little child, He rolls on the 
floor of heaven the planets and the stars. 

Tennyson: When Love went sloping up night's 
stairway towards the light, he stumbled and rested 
awhile. Now, he is ascending and so you live in an 
age of illumination. 

Dickens: Let each writer on the earth plane re- 
member that all cannot be philosophers writing in an 
abstract and abstruse style, else a dreary intellectual 
period. . . . Let some of the writers become masters 
of simple themes, such as the wit of the common man, 
his pathos and his ultimate attainment. Pathos and 
wit are the depths of life. 

Spinoza: The geometrical system should be em- 
ployed in the formulation of a system of divine logic, 
because truth has a compensating normal balance 
which moves in geometrically progressive steps. 
Great thinkers have had true philosophical ideas. 
Most of them were never written down, because the 



246 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

writers knew not rhythm, exactitude, and the almost 
unboundaried field of expression where thinkers 
realize their thoughts when they are in accord with 
systematized knowledge. 

Beecher : Throw away, O theological seminaries, 
your systems of homiletics. Let preachers be natural 
men in the natural pulpit, before their natural 
brothers. You have so homileticized your preaching 
that you have made it artificial. Its inspiration has 
been engulfed and hardly dares to breathe. Free- 
dom of thought in the pulpit is the shortest road to 
God. 

Lincoln: He only is a statesman who, from any 
eminence however high, can come down and dwell 
among the people. The statesman is always con- 
structive until obstacles are in a state of disintegra- 
tion. Some things have a cosmic substantiality; do 
not interfere with them. Injustice always has a 
loose stone somewhere. Enter there and tear it 
down. 

Taine: Literature is a natural reaction of all 
elements in the make-up of human life. Literature, 
when great, writes itself through one sensitive to this 
reaction. Literature is more the result of all-inclu- 
sive feeling than of the describing of a series of events. 

Lafcadio Heaen: Watch Japan. From that 
Oriental kingdom will come a race of people, unless 
you be wise, who will put the Occident to shame. 
You laugh at my idea ! That is your privilege. This 
people knows how to eat. On a handful of rice per 
diem they can comprehend and exhaust Occidental 
knowledge. Watch this race. 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 247 

Walter Scott: Scotland has still her minstrels 
who sing amid the eternal heather. From Scotland 
will come soon another Robert Burns, whose song will 
be read in every cotter's home. From England you 
will receive one who will write somewhat in the style 
of Ivanhoe. The great poem and novel are sorely 
yearned for by a grievously hurt people. 

John Stuart Mill: Some thought is indeed 
axiomatic; such as this: that logic is the conclusion 
arrived at when two premises which agree unite in the 
exposition of a fact. Any wonder the angels some- 
times smile when they see you neglect to avail your- 
selves of the service of the obvious laws of nature? 

Pythagoras: Fire is a divine symbol because it 
consumes. God has been called a consuming Deity. 
The law that emerges from the thought is one of the 
sublimest and most joy-bringing conceptions. God 
is a consuming Deity because, no matter how torn 
events and people may be, higher laws operate until 
they succeed in securing equilibrium. Nature is life 
tuning herself to the harmony of the spheres. 

Walter Pater: The great word-master is he 
who pays least attention to mere words, and knows 
that if thought be deep enough, the words assemble 
themselves in almost perfect literary formation and 
you have attained le grande style. 

Shakespeare: I ask no more surcease of pain, 
even though I stand naked before mine enemy, than 
to know my punishment was deserved. 

Thomas a Kempis: Imitate the life of Jesus by 
thinking his manhood into your own. This is how to 
know Christ. 



248 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Frances Willard: We all thought that if 
;women once secured the franchise, that would redeem 
the political world. Now that millions of women 
have the suffrage, the world knows that it cannot be 
equalized till the economists of the earth ascertain 
what the voting power is for, and how to use it. The 
platform, down to this moment, of every political 
party has consisted of chimerically Utopian pallia- 
tives. When you clear away the wreckage of the 
earth plane war, only then will you learn how to legis- 
late. For that day, which is coming soon, let us pray. 

Oscar Wilde: Paradoxical, will it seem. To 
me, the most sanctified portion of heaven, the hal- 
lowed ground, was the valley, the purgatory, the 
hades, the purple place of violets. Here I learned 
that genius is a gift of the Divine ; not that one may 
glide unthinking down the primrose path, but it is 
given so that art and beauty and all life may be the 
sanctum in which the great mind studies. 

Victor Hugo: Again on the earth plane, I would 
not write JLes Miserables. I would write a work 
called The Peace, and in it there would be pseans of 
joy — just at dawn's first intimation — singing an en- 
semble of joy, like silken threads sewing up the torn 
seam of earth. You have entered through the gates 
into the city of a just world where a Jean Valjean 
and a Javert are anachronisms too grotesque to be 
known as anything but caricatures out of a night- 
mare. 

Ingersoll: Hope is the only religion the world 
could have had previous to the debacle of nineteen 
fourteen. Now a new day is full-formed and bright 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 249 

with the light of a sun whose rays are love, peace, 
equity, ethics and common sense. In this warmth, 
cowards cannot live. They die from starved ideas. 
But true men and strong grow grandly, because they 
know they are ushers in the great theatre of lif e, and 
they direct the way to the place where an illuminating 
drama presents the things that in all ages heroes have 
died for. 

Epictetus: It is wrong to say that any nation 
was ever entirely pagan. Always, the truly virtuous 
know a God. 

Marcus Aurelius : Do not stultify the uneman- 
cipated mind by a sophistry that teaches the dissolu- 
tion of an ethical thing. Truth is the only solidity 
in the universe. 

Pilate: Jesus told me most when not a word 
emerged from those messianic lips in answer to my 
question: "What is truth?" In Him, I beheld a 
man. 

Judas : Unwittingly, I carried out the plan. The 
act will always be to me and to you an eternal 
mystery. Yet afterwards I found my way to Jesus 
and became his brother. Never condemn me before 
you likewise are the comrade of the Master. 

Voltaire: I glory in the caustic sarcasm that 
burned the inflammable vices of my age. I did a 
work that in similar circumstances I would do again. 
Men are made by systems. The more iniquitous the 
systems the stronger are the men made. So, take 
warning, you false prophets and statesmen. If you 
build wrong for the state, no matter how you may 
conceal the blemish, your own work will give rise to 



250 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

a man who will detect its iniquity, and if there be vices 
similar to those of my earth plane age, more Voltaires 
will arise. I was the representative of a type always 
vindicated by posterity. In your age, posterity is 
not far away. This is a warning. 

Emerson : The value of history lies in the widen- 
ing of boundaries both in the scope of thought and 
among physical objects. Scientifically, and in ac- 
cessibility, your world is smaller, but in knowability, 
it is almost as wide as the roof of worlds — the firma- 
ment. In such a compact world of accessibility, and 
such a vast world of distances to be traversed and 
heights to be reached, there is room now for a race 
of spiritual heroes. Attach, then, your effort and 
your vision to the largest immediate work you know, 
and all nature instantly becomes your teacher. In 
the economy of such a fact the sincere will always 
succeed. 

Ruskin : There are not only seven lamps of archi- 
tecture, but a million. Only seven are lit. Go 
about, then, you connoisseurs of art, with your tapers 
of love aflame. Touch the wicks of the million of un- 
opened and unexhausted art themes, and so make 
your world an Athens and a Rome rolled into one. 
Otherwise write demise to culture for the people, and 
extend the thought of ichabod forever for the human 
mind. 

Milton: Printing was intended as a sacred art. 
It has lived through two tragedies. First, the en- 
slavement of the press, and second, the commercial- 
izing of literary production. The first to nationalize 
the press and make the publication of real literature 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 251 

not principally a matter of money, will be classed as 
that nation which elevated the human race. 

Edgar Allan Poe: Each writer should be a 
master of a particular phase of literature. The tend- 
ency is now at meridian on the earth plane to write 
of practical things in a trite, common and ordinary 
way. Most writers fear the poetical and beautiful 
in their prose. This is the calamity of such a course : 
If you cannot grow beautiful flowers of thought in 
the soil of your literature, you create a desert. Very 
few, unless necessity drives them, care to cross that 
desert. Keats said: "A thing of beauty is a joy 
forever." 

Bunyan: The Pilgrim's progress has at last led 
him to where he has met character, strength, love, the 
ambassadors of God. He was weary, sorely tried, 
and was glad to lay down his burden, but this weary 
pilgrim soon will be weary no more, for in his medi- 
tation he sees you all drawing nigh to your Father 
who is God, and He is glad because He hears, all over 
the earth plane, on the every-day sabbath, cathedral 
bells in the true churches ringing and calling the 
people home. 

Kitchener: Do not criticize too severely; it is a 
waste of time. Your most imperative demand now 
is for state organization of all industries ; the mobiliz- 
ing, as you did in the last two years of the war, of all 
trades and professions, to work for one common end, 
that all the nation may have rehabilitation and tender 
to those in power every element of mental and physi- 
cal strength to be used for the common good; other- 
wise civilization perishes. 



252 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Charlotte Corday: Liberty is truth made ap- 
parent and actual by the divine touch just at the 
point where human strength has ebbed, and divine 
assistance enters to make justice live, gentle and real. 

Carlyle: The epoch of demolishing storms, in- 
comprehensible, cataclysmic, catastrophic, is subsid- 
ing peacefully into a civilization redressed from 
wrong. The danger is that the light of the great age 
may be so lightning-penetrative and rock-splitting 
that those you deem leaders may be blinded by the 
glare. School yourselves then, through your desire, 
to encounter, as men, the new wealth, which has been 
accumulated for you by the unnumbered in the past 
who died to give you strength. The way is so easy 
that it is the most dangerous hour in all time. Mark 
ye this: Be sure that the expenditure of your 
strength is right. Otherwise, pray that the landslide 
may demolish you, and cast you into the yawning 
abyss, a place prepared for fools. 

Stevenson: I wrote a book about Dr. Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde. It was about myself. When the South 
Sea air failed to give me physical strength, I came 
here and left Mr. Hyde there where you are. In 
every life you find a dual nature. The art of living 
simmers to this thought: Bend down your high to 
your low dualism so that the high is a continual edu- 
cation to the low in quiet, homely, simple things, that 
in crisis-hours stand as your revealed constitution of 
character. 

Disraeli: The youth of a nation are those who 
have sense enough never to grow old. They are not 
only the trustees of posterity, but are divine jewels of 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 253 

human life, set in the ring of a plane. They kindle 
enthusiasm so powerfully that its force is felt equally 
in every direction. 

Confucius: There are bo-trees in every land, 
made sacred by some master who has rested beneath 
their protecting limbs. This is true both figuratively 
and literally. Do not doubt me too strongly, for it 
is nearly revealed. 

Michel Angelo: Sculpture is the massive art, 
no matter how delicate the artist. The true sculptor 
always lives in a world of vast conceptions. 

Weber: Music is a rivulet wandering down God's 
mountain-side into the valley where the people are, 
so that its clear waters may be a refreshing forever, 

Wagner: I would that the whole world might 
pray unceasingly for the musical dramatist who will 
write in music the epic of the earth plane war. The 
theme and plot are there. It awaits but some master 
of song to fan to life all the parts of an opera in which 
the music of all the operas ever written shall melt in 
a furnace of sound, so that there may arise the tonal 
depiction of an episode in history that had a million 
heroes and a million heroines, and a colossal number 
of heroic events so universal in their wonder that a 
volk-lied and a valkyr-lied, and the thunder of all the 
gods of Goth and Gaul is but silence in comparison. 
He who will write this drama is born. In a few years 
it shall be given to you. Prepare yourselves to hear 
the song. 

Josephus : History, thou art much of a thief, oft- 
times cruel, and principally a base deceiver. Could 
I have judged from thy episodes that the Hebrew; 



254 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

people would return to Palestine again, as they furled 
their tents and stood before the wall of lamentation, 
and for ages dry dust choked their voice? Now we 
know they are going home to Palestine. Going 
home ! Is there a sweeter thought ? The temple will 
be rebuilt. Already a Hebrew university nestles on 
the Mount of Olives, and a Hebrew ship sails the 
seas. My People, God never turned His face away 
from you, He but closed His eyes once in sorrow, 
now He is glad and He sees you. Be ye also glad. 

Abdul Baha: Persia has a place among the na- 
tions of the re-made world. Persian art is not alone 
the poems of the old literature and the gorgeous rugs 
that her people wove. Persia is a race of religious 
people. From Persia will come one element of the 
religion to be. It will be the teaching of tenacity 
amounting almost to slavery for truth. 

Caenegie: The League of Nations united to a 
chain of libraries is now being called into service by 
humanity. Build me no monument in stone. Con- 
template with me what a League of Nations linked 
with a world-chain of libraries means to the world 
in the work of the abolition of war. Join me in that 
thought. That is the only record of what I was able 
to do at the Hague, and in building the homes of col- 
lections of books. 

Thoeeaxj : Back to nature and the simple life was 
inspired from this plane among the people of the 
earth plane a decade ago. As soon as you get back 
to nature, which is the simple life, then physical life 
is a comfort. You cannot escape being a royal 
friend, and others know your worth without self -ad- 



MESSAGES OF FIFTY-FIVE 255 

vertisement. The son of the open field is always 
recognized for his stature. Be guided then by the 
law of life-love. Out with nature ! 

Alexander Hamilton: I did desire, in my 
economic monetary system, commercial supremacy 
for the United States. She has achieved that, and 
now she is in a more dangerous position than any 
threatened war. Over half of Europe is physically 
starving. The United States has the wealth which is 
food. Tell her that all the planes are praying that 
she feed the hungry. If she does less than this, then 
already is she a pauper among great nations. 

McKinley: The Isthmian Canal is constructed. 
The waters of two oceans have joined together. This 
is but a significant precursor of all oceans and nations 
joining together soon into one democracy with one 
government ministering to the needs of all mankind. 
Is my ideal too large? Make it smaller if you dare. 
Nationality is an ever enlarging force. This so- 
called proud isolation has been tried and failed. It 
leads to degeneration. I demand for the world an 
honoured place among the spheres. 

Czolgosz : Old Europe made me what I was, and 
I shot to death a man. I am informed that it is not 
possible for similar European economic conditions 
to make a man like I was. I have long been here in 
the place of pain, but I know that God is good, be- 
cause the one I assassinated met me, forgave me, and 
is my friend. I am trying to be worthy to be his. 

Wordsworth: Poets are not necessary to the 
new age in great numbers. But those she will call 
forth will be as great as the new age. So you will 



256 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

have in your time your Dante, your Milton, and your 
Shakespeare. 

Edmund Burke: The basic fact in the building 
of a government is to ascertain the wishes of the peo- 
ple. There should be a non-political, non-partisan, 
free and highly honourable group of humanitarians 
and philanthropists, and in the Platonic sense, genius- 
kings, who will make it their life-work to discover 
the wishes of the minority and majority of the people, 
reconcile both together so that a nation may become 
a people's will and voice. 
February 8, 1920. 



All healing is divine. The church which substantially 
ignores the gift of healing has eliminated one of its most 
effective functions and one of its strongest incentives to 
faith. When recently a celebrated "healer" visited this city, 
it was stated in the press that the clergy wished it clearly 
understood that people were not to look for miracles. Was 
this not a mistake? Surely the church which has ceased to 
look for wonders in God's work is pitiable. Miracles are 
wonders performed by the J)ivine power in harmony with 
higher laws which, though not understood by many, are 
nevertheless as natural as Love, as constant as God. On the 
other hand, the doctor who excludes faith, hope, optimism 
and prayer from his available healing agencies is as foolish 
as one who omits medicine, surgery and sanitation from his 
treatment of cases where they are sometimes, in the opinion 
of the present writer, immeasurably useful. The thought 
that the use of medicine weakens the faith of the patient in 
other agencies comes of the false supposition that the former 
are not divine agencies. 

[A. D. W.] 



258 



THE GIFT OF HEALING 

Andrew Taylor Still 

My students of the earth plane at the conference 
of discovery, this is a moment of great honour in my 
life, and greatly do I appreciate it. 

One of the greatest truths of healing ever enunci- 
ated was spoken by the world's greatest healer: "I 
have meat to eat that ye know not of." He might 
have said in the language of the twentieth century, 
I know the method by which to charge my soul and 
my body with an energy that makes me one who can 
excite forces of healing in the individual, so that I 
fail to effect a cure only when I myself am not 
charged with this kinetic energy. Three laws, if held 
as principles, couple me with the source of divine 
energy which makes me a healer: 

1. I must meet my patient, forget all personal 
considerations, join my consciousness with his, and 
for a time, be him. 

2. I must understand that originality will come 
to me instantly through the process of inspiration 
when I eliminate from my own consciousness — and it 
can be done — any personal deterring thoughts which 
prevent my mind from being a pure clean chamber 
which at once attracts energy from an exhaustless 
source. 

3. Healers, in the future, must adopt all physical 

259 



260 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

and mechanical agencies, as a means and not as an 
end, to connect the patient through the healer with the 
source of divine healing energy. 

The healer must resolve as follows: I will begin 
a course of reading and study, embracing the whole 
field of psychical investigation. I will practise each 
day the cleaning of my own soul. I will be a firm 
believer in immortality and I will practise what I 
teach. I will realize that all cures, as far as the prac- 
titioner is concerned, are effected when he breathes in 
a certain psychic constituent of the physical atmos- 
phere, for it has been demonstrated to me that the 
air I breathe is not composed of the elements, nitro- 
gen, oxygen, argon, helium, etc., alone, but contains 
a definite gas, more vital than all of these, which the 
Twentieth Plane personalities have informed us is 
called by them "avic." 

Each patient coming to the practitioner must be 
viewed by him as a triune individual. He is physi- 
cal ; he has mental qualities, and he fives in his imagi- 
nation. Every person lives in two worlds no matter 
on what plane he finds himself. These are the world 
of external things and the world of his imagination. 
Every individual lives in the world of his imagination. 
Every external impression sets up a picture there. 
Every word you utter to him builds there a vision of 
your personality, the result of your character and 
ability while treating him, and makes him the most 
divine person on earth, as he knows things in his 
imagination. 

The patient's world of imagination may be entered 
through the world of colour. In a pink light he feels 



THE GIFT OF HEALING 261 

quite passive, and is most susceptible to healing sug- 
gestions. In a yellow light he will meet the chal- 
lenge of your power and work with you logically 
towards a cure. In a green light he will understand 
things which he must learn, yet which are extremely 
difficult to teach. In a blue light you will discover 
original methods of treating your patient. In a pur- 
ple light you will best soothe those with obsessions. 
The foregoing are the great psychic lights. 
Remember these precepts : 

1. Function with your patient and identify your- 
self with him. 

2. Use to the farthest limit the element of hope 
within him. 

3. Use the method of jiu jitsu, i.e., call out all the 
powers of his own being to help you to conquer his 
sickness. 

4. Be a man of importance in the community in 
which you live. 

5. Study the therapeutic values of colour. 

6. Never argue with a patient ; explain. 

7. Know that hope springs eternal in the human 
breast, and that hope is the foundation of every cure. 

8. Breathe the great psychic element of the 
atmosphere. Great men breathe for high achieve- 
ment. 

Human thought should be tuned up; should be 
made a thing of harmony. This results from the 
therapeutic value of music. As a practitioner, when 
thoroughly worn out, listen to some great musical 
composer and advise your patients to do likewise. 
When the vibrations of thought and music mingle, the 



262 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

human mind is tuned to health exactly as the keys of 
a violin tune up the strings of that instrument. Be 
dogmatic in only one thing with your patient, that 
is in teaching him how to let you cure him. 

Stimulate the almost unboundaried and inexhausti- 
ble curative agencies within the human system to that 
activity in which nature through stimulation becomes 
the healer. If you do not succeed by this system, it 
is because you are an exhausted reservoir of healing 
energy, an ego without the kinetic and intrinsic power 
of excitation while endeavouring to heal your patient. 

In psychic healing, time is not an element. The 
man who has completed his education has lost his hold 
on life. 

Because of the nervous tension of the earth races, 
and of the millions of prayers to heaven, the physique 
of earth has undergone a radical change. Your re- 
cent epidemic has been nature's last general prevalent 
misery. During the last three months on the earth 
plane, every human being has undergone a physical 
and psychical change. The time has come when 
methods must also be changed. 

Finally, a great man on any plane breathes in a 
psychic element which is one cf soul illumination, and 
to the extent that he breathes this element alone is 
he great. 

The element of hope in an individual is the one 
thing, physical and mental, not diseased, and is the 
collecting station of the curative forces within the 
human being where the power of cure resides in him- 
self. 
February 8, 1920. 



THE ELEMENT OF WORTH IN POETRY 

By William Blake 

If it were not for beauty in all common objects, 
so that there be no common objects, this would be a 
cold and barren world where even rocks would feel 
unnatural. There is nothing more misunderstood 
than poetry. I would ask you to disabuse your 
minds of the idea that poetry is a rare thing. Poetry 
is the most natural thing in the universe, and there- 
fore extremely common. 

There are many forms of poetry — the poetry of 
prose, the poetry of rhythm and rhyme, forming 
verse, the poetry of love expressed in any form. All 
nature is a poem and we are poets dwelling in a 
poetic world. 

Sometimes the philosophical soul, the exploring 
soul, the soul that intends to know even though a 
mountain must be moved and an ocean held at arm's 
length, has gone deeper into the mysteries and asked 
this question: How is it that notwithstanding life's 
cruelest adversity, the soul preserves its equanimity, 
poise and normality? On larger ground one may ask 
that question in a larger way. What is it that pre- 
serves the faith of the people when, like dissolving 
views in the kaleidoscope of historic presentation, 
empires fall and the fabric of society is pulled apart 
and blown like sawdust in a storm? 

263 



264 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

One does not need to be a writer of poetry to 
answer such a question. One needs but to recognize 
that life is a poem, and that all the content of life is 
poetical form and truth. Individual reason is main- 
tained and national spirit preserved because of the 
fact that in human consciousness there is an art 
gallery, a library, a school, a place of wonder in which, 
though all the external world is reeling and rolling 
like a foundering ship, some beautiful spectacle is 
permanently enshrined, where the mind goes, even as 
a Brahmin into the temple to be with Vishnu, there 
to preserve equanimity while the thunder is roaring 
and the temple itself is rocking on its foundation. 

The most mechanically wheeled and cogged intel- 
lect of a material business man, the soul-thought 
parallelogical intellect of the scientist, the mind 
deeply immersed in the estimation of pragmatic 
values and glorying in materialism — all these minds 
think themselves as antithetical to what they call that 
abstract form of beauty, — poetry. Yet let a super- 
mind analyze these self-sufficient materialistic minds 
and what do we discover? We find that they are liv- 
ing individuals through the psychology of uncon- 
scious beneficence. 

Insanity is beauty gone out of life. Abnormality 
is the obstacle of soul disorder that prevents adapta- 
tion to beauty. Every form of beauty is a poem — 
the farewell kiss of a mother on the cheek of her son 
about to be a soldier; the vessel dashed in pieces on a 
rocky shore. What one sees as the lightning flashes 
is as poetical as Dante's Inferno. A stern man issu- 
ing a stern command is a form of poetry. Buds on 



ELEMENT OF WORTH IN POETRY 265 

the trees in springtime are poems. The dancing feet 
of raindrops as they patter on the roof while you He 
in bed and listen — this is a form of poetry, and has 
the effect on your soul of making you love your life, 
in fact you live only because in every part of your en- 
vironment you see some form of poetry. 

Consciousness works thus: everything you see, 
everything you do, all that you are is continually con- 
tributing some beauty to your constitution. When 
that process ceases, you dry up, shrivel or decay. Do 
not be blase and say in smug derision: "I hate 
poetry. I cannot understand it. It is a luxurious 
ornament intended only for women and w^eak minds." 
If you do, nature takes this way of punishing you: 
She looks you in the eyes, shakes a long finger of light 
in your face, and tells you: "God is the great poet, 
and on the earth every child is a poem." 

As I have told you, beauty is poetry and poetry is 
the highest form of beauty. 

April 11, 1920. 



SAPPHIC FRAGMENTS 

On October twenty-eighth, nineteen nineteen, a 
Boston counsellor at law wrote me suggesting the 
possibility that Sappho might remember some of her 
fragments which have been lost to us through the 
ages. Following his suggestion, I spoke of it to 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge who immediately replied: 

"Write this down : 

'Morning moans and foams along 
The shore-lines of the day.' 

"That is a lost couplet from Sappho. We will give yoii 
more as we may. She cannot give you any whole poem as 
she does not remember any in full, but we will give you lines 
and even may give you stanzas if she can recollect them." 

A few moments later Mother quoted another 
Sapphic fragment as follows: 

"The ocean with its ocean lips 
Kisses the lips of the encircling sky." 

More recently I have received other fragments in 
prose translation. One received March twenty- 
second, nineteen twenty, reads as follows: 

"The petals of my rose have fallen ; 
My heart is weary with its pain; 

My cheeks are coloured like the face of the moon. 

266 



SAPPHIC FRAGMENTS 267 

"I heard a bird cry with notes that broke and fell from 
a bitter throat. 

"My lover, why hast thou forsaken me — 
Made me feel that nature had sickened 
In her course, weeping with me?" 

This, I was told, is almost a literal translation of 
one of Sappho's rare lyrics long lost but now re- 
covered in literal English prose. Another fragment, 
received in the same way, is a part, Sappho says, of 
a poem titled: "The dews of Phseon's love." Here 
are the lines : 



"Little waves tap hesitatingly on the door, 
Then laugh and roll back, laughing down the shore. 



5) 



These two fragments were received together and 
without hesitation upon my asking for them without 
warning other than that of- the first occasion. Over 
four months had elapsed. 

As I expressed a further desire for Sapphic frag- 
ments such as had been promised, I received the fol- 
lowing. The response was immediate. All the re- 
maining fragments were communicated at this time. 

April 18, 1920— Sappho 



«i 



l I hardly think the fragments I can give you from my 
memory will be worthy of your book. They will have to 
be in prose translation. The lines will be unequal. You 
see, I do not know that you understand me at all, except 
that they tell me you do. 

"Here is one almost complete in thought concerning 



268 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Ph^on 



a 



In the light of the white day's hour, 
The sun opened the tiny lips 
Of all the mind of Phason. 

"For the mind has many lips 
That kiss you with their thought 
When that mind is a soul that embraces yours. 

"In the dark hour of night, 
Came the silversmith of the sky — 
The moon. 

"And as Phaeon lay sleeping, 
Silvered with glory 
The calm contour of his face. 

"In the pink hour of the morn — 
The dawn, 
He rose and found his face tingling 

"With the sensation 
Of many imperishable kisses, and then — : 
He thought again of me. 

"Now all the hours are joined 
In him and me. 
His face is gone; his soul remains. 

"But there will be 
Forever more 
The grief of a departed love; 



a 



For grief that reaches over 
From action past 
To present purpose 



SAPPHIC FRAGMENTS 269 

"Is sometimes so intense 
That nature trembles 
Lamenting with a lover's sense, the loss." 

Having dictated these lines, Sappho remarked: 
"Another little thing I used to like was named 

A Million Blades of Geass 

"A sward is a nation of beings. 
The ripples of wind send a thrill 
Through millions of green hair-fingers 
That point from the earth to the sun. 

"Happy blades of grass; 
Adornments of the earth; 
Lines of green light reflecting 
Touches of infinitude. 

"Little lines of tragedy, too, you are 
For when the feet of man 
Or the wheels of the chariot 
Walk or roll over you, 

"Then crushed to earth you lie, 
Mingling your blinding tears 
With the dews of delicacy 
On the strong bosom of the sphere." 

Sappho dictated one more which she said had been 
written in blank verse in her own Greek. The lines 
are reproduced in prose-form, as she spoke them to 
me: 



270 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

"Broken Waves 

"Deeply I contemplate thee, ocean ; 
How vast and emotional art thou! 
Conqueror of all save thyself; 
By thyself not conquered at all. 
Vast body of energy unconfined, 
Responsive to emotions as delicate 
As a forgotten tear. 
In the presence of thee, O Ocean, 
I feel that thy power is supreme, and I 
But flotsam and jetsam that thou 
Deignest not to consider. 

"But my soul, O Ocean, 
Knows what thou canst not know 
Though I am small and thou art large, 
I smile in the face of thee ; 
I am from the gods ; I am like them too. 
Thou to the gods art a servant. 
Thou art a vast pool of water 
Snuggled in a wrinkle of the earth.' 



?> 



The main purpose of this chapter was to comply 
with the request of the counsellor at law to secure, if 
possible, direct from the memory of Sappho that 
which would be a distinct contribution to Sapphic 
literature. There was also another reason for pur- 
suing this quest. If we could secure from the great 
genius of Sappho genuine Sapphic poetry, even 
though in a somewhat prosaic translation, then the 
evidence of authenticity would be overwhelming, dis- 
posing at once of all contrary theories, for the re- 
porter knew that he was absolutely incapable, though 
a poet, of composing such lines. That Louis Ben- 



SAPPHIC FRAGMENTS 271 

jamin, the Instrument, was also incapable, and to say 
that such lines emanated from the subconscious mind 
without a great poet's instrumentality would be quite 
unbelievable. 



"Beware of the dead ; they are learning to talk back." 

— Hubbard 

"These aphorisms are selected from the book called 
'Universe.* " 



272 



THOUGHT-BOKN JEWELS 

An epigram is like the kernel of a nut. It is the 
consummate word of truth. In the earlier volume of 
this Revelation,* in the chapter entitled Life Princi- 
ples some observations were made pointing out the 
difficulty or even the impossibility of creating epi- 
grams merely by the desire of the will. Our friends 
of the heaven- world claim that it is not an intellectual 
but a psychic process. The aphorisms and epigrams 
contained in this chapter are all spontaneous. Some 
of them were spoken with such accompanying notes 
as would show them to be well-recognized proverbs 
on the higher planes. These came apparently as 
quotations illustrating important truths. 

Some of the sayings of this chapter are collected 
from the other chapters of the present volume. 
These are re-presented here for convenience of refer- 
ence. The epigrams of the earlier volume are not 
repeated here, though some of them did not occur in 
the first edition as, for instance, Shakespeare's line: 
"I would be a silent listener in the house of the im- 
mensities of my God," and Dorothy Wordsworth's: 
"Jesus could not be God if he would not speak to the 
humblest human soul." 

The names quoted may not be the authors in every 
instance. Many of them were. This is usually the 
case when the sayings occur in other chapters of the 

* The Twentieth Plane, 

273 



274 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

book. On one occasion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 
when requested to do so by the reporter, supplied im- 
mediately over thirty of the aphorisms contained in 
this chapter, following a plan he suggested : we stated 
our thought in a brief but sometimes crude form; 
he immediately grasped the soul of the idea and ex- 
pressed it in the form of an aphorism or an epigram. 
The classification of the sayings under four head- 
ings was suggested and made by him. His initials 
will be used. 

Philosophy 

The intellect never gave birth to an epigram. 

— MUton 

The sincere soul utilizes the universe for a brain. 

— S. T. C. 

Most lives are an empty theatre ; all the actors of j oy are 
fled. — Shakespeare 

A proverb is an epigram become the property of the peo- 
ple. — S. T. C. 

A sentence well composed is a straight line. 

— Shakespeare 

Consciousness is personality touching the universe at vital 
points. — S. T. C. 

We are born with attitudes — quotations from our ances- 
tors. — Emerson 

The beginning of all knowledge is enquiry. 

— Mary Youle Watson 



THOUGHT-BGHN JEWELS 275 

In the presence of another, one is never the sole author 
of one's words. — S. T. C. 

A thing itself is never great — only its emanations. 

— Crookes 

Literature is an artist who takes the thought of the people 
and makes a monument of it. — S. T. C. 

Is your education completed — then you have lost your 
hold on life. —A. T. Still 

I knocked so long I knocked myself down. 

— Hubbard 

All the time that ever was or ever will be is compressed 
into, and for that reason is, the present moment. 

— S. T. C. 

No sincere man was ever completely mistaken. 

— Disraeli 

The frequency of a thing is its disaster. 

— Shakespeare 

Be quiet long enough to hear what nature has to say. 

— Emerson 

Do not tunnel through the mountain of thought — sur- 
mount it. — S. T. C. 

The professional mind is restricted by the limitations of 
its time. — S. T. C. 

Some library shelves are garbage heaps. 

— Tasso 

Literature is experience translated into language. 

—S. T. C, 



276 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

That which is artificial consumes itself, time is a great 
trustee. — Disraeli 

All literature is memory and observation. 

—S. T. C. 

No one ever saw a picture in an art gallery. He saw it 
in his soul. —. S. T. C. 

All that any soul can know of nature is the human quality 
it puts into it. — S. T. C. 

Love life so much that you cannot divine what is most 
beautiful in it, all life being beautiful. — S. T. C. 

All the world loves innocence, it is so scarce. 

— o. 1 . G. 

Hell is paved with dollars — fortunately a currency that 
will burn. — Hubbard 

The quietude of massive things is the supreme evidence 
of their power. — S. T. C. 

Man is the method by which the Divine comprehends Him- 
self. — Drummond 

Some questions are too great for argument. 

— Schopenhauer 

You know truth only when you are a member of her 
household. 

— Shakespeare 

Genius is the accumulated experience of the soul. 

— Schopenhauer 

Plausibility is wisdom seeking expression through the field 
of least resistance. — Schopenhauer 



THOUGHT-BOHN JEWELS 277 

Time is less than a dream. 

— Schopenhauer 

Every genius is a reincarnation. 

— Schopenhauer 

Future events have their initiation in the present. 

— Wm. James 

A seed is already a flower even though it never blossom". 

- — Spinoza 

Logic is the intuition of reason. 

— Spinoza 

A human soul is a world within a world. 

— Spinoza 

We are only sponsors for truth; we never create it. 

—S. T. C. 

The soul in after life remembers only soul-impression . 

—S. T. C. 

The universe is a monoatom. 

— Crookes 

Vision is the key that unlocks the door of fact. 

— Disraeli 

Darkness is a more dense, compact form of light. 

—S. T. C. 

Knowledge was never the property of an individual. 

— Emerson 

Truth is the measure that reason takes of a fact. 

—S. T. C. 



278 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Religion 

Heaven is everywhere if one is present when love's about. 

— Tolstoi 

Vision is the momentum of truth. 

— Disraeli 

Those who love us most are our truest representatives. 

— Emerson 

The great play plays on forever ; its immortality is taken 
from the life of the people. 

— Ben Jons on 

Exercise is virtue; the only sin is to stand still. 

— Emerson 

There is no such thing as a finished revelation. 

— S. T. C. 

Genius is a social virtue. 

— Hubbard 

The greatest advocate of virtue is virtue herself. 

— Hubbard 

No one can be worthy of another till he forgets himself. 

— Mary Youle Watson 

The soul, through pain, finds truth is love. 

— S. T. C. 

The authorship of inspiration belongs to God; you are 
the publisher. 

— S. T. C. 

Only the great have dispensed with conceit. 

— S. T. C. 



THOUGHT-BORN JEWELS 279 

Love is an inextinguishable light. Keep candles burning 
in your soul. 

— S. T. C. 

Religion is the wonder of the soul. o m q 

Generosity is the method of love. c _, -, 

Everything must contain the divine; it is the author of 
its own emanations. 

— Crookes 

The most difficult thing to do is to be bad. 

— Savonarola 

Think of all men as brothers and soon they will be. 

— S. T. C. 

You never know what Master you have with you in the 
crude soul-form of human flesh. 

— S. T. C. 

None know the hour or the day of the effect of another's 
written thought. 

— S. T. C. 

Poetry 

The aurora is a tapestry of light hanging from the sky. 

— S. T. C. 

Meditation is twilight prayer. 

— S. T. C. 

The eternal boy in the man makes life a playground to 
the great. 

— S. T. C. 



280 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH* 

Music is a flame of love mounting to the skies. 

— Shakespeare 

The angels hear the tread of God as he walks down the 
silences of time. 

— Mary Youle Watson 

Delicacy is the poetry of might. 

— Harriet B. Stow* 

A flower is a tear of sympathy. 

— £. T. C. 

The strongest things are the most fluid. Witness the 
ocean. 

—S. T. C. 

The most finished thing is infinitely delicate. Can one 
add finish to the violet? 

— S. T. C. 

Friendship often makes decision but the tissue of a dream. 

— Shakespeare 

Nothing is more eloquent than a tear-drop. 

— Tasso 

Supreme music is heard only by the soul. 

— Paganmi 

The grandest theatre is the drama chamber of the imag- 
ination. 

— Milton 

Innocence is the fragrance of beauty. 

—S. T. a 

Sound is the music of light. 

— Crookes 



THOUGHT-BORN JEWELS 281 

The eyes of early morn peep over the hills and find yo;< 
sleeping. Are you dreaming of love? 

—S. T. C. 

Every snowflake is a kiss of God. 

— Hubbard 

Emotion 

Insanity is beauty gone out of life. 

— S. T. C. 

God himself cannot find in the universe a place to be 
alone. 

—S. T. C. 

Wonder is love in the eyes of a child. 

— S. T. C. 

Love surprises us by revealing unexplored territories in 
our own minds. This is the loveliness of love. 

— S. T. C. 

Maternity is the elan that a woman's life achieves through 
the art of love. 

— S. T. C. 

Colour is beauty seeing her reflection in the mirror of life. 

—S. T. C. 



THE JOURNEY OF DEATH 

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox — Given in Trance 

Address 

Dear Friends of the Earth Plajste: 

I am not here, dear, dear brothers and sisters, to 
prove to you that I am the ego — the soul that once 
was Ella Wheeler Wilcox; but I am that soul. I 
have come to tell you of my experience in passing 
death, so that the horror, the agony, the misery of it 
may be removed from the minds of those who have 
fear in their hearts. 

In the heaven-world we are governed by feeling 
more than by what you would call reason. You 
think that when you are logical you are most exact, 
but before the thought was feeling. Feeling was 
primary. Where you find beauty in nature, you dis- 
cover something deeply immersed in feeling. Feel- 
ing is the highest form of contemplation. You would 
hardly realize that in the physical world. You 
should so use every power of your being, your soul, 
your imagination, your emotion, that you may be- 
come infinitely sensitive to all moods, tenses, emotions 
— then you are living. 

Being good means being wholesome, and being 
wholesome is having illumination and realizing things. 
The transition to heaven or the astral world is the 
substitution of grand and noble conceptions of a God 

282 






THE JOURNEY OF DEATH 283 

of love instead of ignoble, crude, earth plane ideas. 
The experience of death substituted for me life and 
love and friends with great things to do. I have left 
the bogey traditions, the machinery of fear behind. 
I have unwrapped myself from superstition. 

No matter what you do to the physical body, to 
the brain, to the astral brain, suffering is only known 
through what the consciousness realizes. In this 
great world suffering would be a kind of miracle. 
The astral body never feels pain as the physical body 
does. I do not care what seers, prophets, mystics, 
what Bible literature tells you of a literal hell where 
you are burned and tortured — I tell you that once 
the soul leaves the physical body, the new body can- 
not possibly feel pain as you feel it in your world. 

If a person in your world has lost a leg or an eye, 
that is immediately restored in the astral body. The 
most intense form of suffering that we ever endure 
is when our thought tells us that we have not meas- 
ured up to our responsibilities. Yes, there are some 
here in the valley. We have quiet chambers of con- 
templation for those who have injured others. It is 
a purgatory of renewing. There is remorse and re- 
gret. See that you are not the victims of the deepest 
regret. 

If I were to reincarnate, to come back to earth, I 
would want to belong to the democracy of radiant 
beings. Some day the earth plane will build a monu- 
ment to death. People will silently walk by and bow 
their heads and offer thanks for death. Death is a 
great and glorious and noble experience. Lovingly 
clasp hands with and embrace the beautiful, the in- 



284 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

spiring, the uplifting in life. You who suffer most 
have not been doing this. Life is a bright star of 
optimism set in the sky of God's hope. 

A great British statesman once said: "I give back 
to an audience in a flood what I receive from them in 
a vapour." You receive from all the beauty of life 
what you give out in a flood. If not, the artistic 
things of life sweep by like a lost breeze, and do not 
touch you with their power and fragrance. 
April 11, 1920. 



LIFE PHASES 

The pictures in this chapter, though based on in- 
dividual experience, are, nevertheless, of universal ap- 
plication. They teach life lessons which all, some 
day, must learn. The true world an which all souls 
live, whatever plane they may inhabit, is within the 
circumference of their own imagination. Imagina- 
tion with its emotional deeps and heights will consti- 
tute forever the arena of our conscious activities. 
Hence, the imagination and the emotions are our only 
measure of life values. The physical and intellectual 
forces can add nothing to the interest of life till glori- 
fied by the imagination and thrilled by the emotions. 
We should live rich lives in these fields of experience 
where dreams do not need to become real because 
they are truth. 

Life is a sacred gladness to those who, in fellow- 
ship with the Highest, are living harmony and power 
in a universe ever widening to their consciousness, 
and growing richer because of loved ones who make 
up the commonwealth of the true-hearted, the empire 
of those who love one another and constitute, there- 
fore, the kingdom of heaven. 

Coleridge. 
Faith 

What is more inspiring than to behold a man tak- 
ing a measure of his strength? He feels his body 

285 



286 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

strong; he tests his mind, and it passes the ordeal. 
In scholastic pursuits he has won honours ; he is famed 
as a thinker, as a character, as a writer. He has 
achieved, in the field of the intellect, the promise of 
the soul. In the heaven-consciousness of love, he has 
had experiences that give him strength of body and of 
mind equal to that of a thousand other souls. 

What is more wonderful than to behold such a soul 
concentrate his life to call forth the faith of a puny, 
undeveloped mind? It requires a greater effort for 
the strong to place themselves on the same level with 
the weak than to walk on the heights with the strong. 
Descending the mountain is often more perilous than 
ascending. We have heard of the soul of a genius 
on the earth plane who met a woman who, though she 
had great vision, had nevertheless some disabilities 
which, when encountered by the greatest, would tear 
and break and crush the strong soul and the great 
heart into ripped ribbons of destruction. 

The strong soul met one day this weak soul and 
loved her. He had the universe to reveal to her. 
She had only an impaired vision. Each hour that 
he was with her he knew that he was throwing away 
part of his genius and soon would be an exhausted 
man-soul. But what was strength to do for weak- 
ness? Crush her to death by selfishly withdrawing 
himself? Or destroy himself by giving himself to 
her so that weakness might grow strong? The wis- 
dom of love, one night in a dream, told him the 
course to follow, and this is what he decided to do : 

"In the experience of my love with her, I am a 
[white rose. Each time I think of her, one of my 



LIFE PHASES 287 

petals falls, and when I am with her, two or three 
are torn from the stem by her and tossed to the winds. 
But I will stay; I will let her strip me bare until not 
a petal remains," and he did. She tore from him all 
that he had. Then she left him bare, and blinded 
for a time, and he wept and felt that he was crushed 
to death. 

How do I know that when the bitter pain was over 
and she left his side never to meet him again on the 
earth, he was stronger and his faith was as the faith 
of the Father of Love? Because he did not blame 
the woman-soul. He loves her still. He has no re- 
grets, and sometimes when the lights are out, and the 
house is silent, and the city sounds are asleep, he lives 
again strength's faith-hour with weakness, and is as 
gentle as the fingers of a mother when they touch 
the cheek of her baby that is resting on the bed of life. 
His soul secured its tenderness from strength, and 
in every perplexing problem followed a steadfast 
course, sometimes moving through depths of darkness 
illuminated by the light of faith. 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 

Emotion 

There are some scenes in nature that a few casual, 
accidental things so immortalize that they become the 
most beautiful scenes in all the world. One might 
pass a certain part of the seashore a hundred times 
and never know that it was so beautiful that no artist 
could do more than see dimly the elusive glory of 
it all. A storm disturbs its calmness; some debris is 
blown along the shore; a vessel founders; lives are 



288 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lost! Wreckage is strewn around! Most of the 
wreckage is cleared away, but a casual piece of sail, 
a rope, and — a torn letter is left on the shore. Then 
you come along and contemplate the place, and for- 
evermore, because of the romance spoken so pathetic- 
ally by the few articles on the shore, this place be- 
comes to you as great as Athens to the Greek mind. 

Every life is a seashore to some other life, and 
some day a sailor of love will tread that shore. Then 
the seashore will rise from dormancy; the breakers 
will roar, and maddened storms will sweep along the 
coast of being. The shore will love the universe — a 
seashore in love with a sailor. Emotion is a path 
along which love walks until emotion and love with 
the fusing, molten heat of the interior of the sun, find, 
through the vision and consciousness which they now 
share together, that they have emotionalized love 
where the waves roll along the endless shore — the 
outline of all the skies. 

Anna Howard Shaw. 

Vengeance 

Belgium was a nation, happy, prosperous and cul- 
tured. She was proud of her art and the develop- 
ment of her industry, which supported both art and 
labour. Belgium went to sleep in peace one night 
and next morning awoke and found the world at war. 
It was hardly an hour before she was a crushed and 
bleeding nation with an army of occupation quartered 
in her homes. Even then Belgium thought that her 
rights, her libraries, her arts and her public buildings 
would be respected by the conqueror. The great 



LIFE PHASES 289 

cathedral of Rheims was destroyed. Many of the 
great Belgian cities were bombarded. Priceless 
works of art were destroyed by the vandals. The 
maidens of the nation were violated. Insane spolia- 
tion and lust as fiendish as the sins of hell tortured 
Belgium on a cross of knives. The remnant of the 
nation cried for vengeance. The cry was heard by 
heaven. Revenge has a place among divine powers. 
It is not cruel. It is not vindictive. It is the judg- 
ment and the recompense of compensation. 

O Belgium! I, the soul of one who knew the im- 
mortality of a nation's glory, know that once some 
things on the earth are destroyed in material form, 
they can never be replaced. Greece to-day does not 
represent the Greece of my epoch or the days of 
Athens. But there is our Greece as there is our Bel- 
gium, created by the cry for vengeance, a thing more 
beautiful than the thought of Plato, the sculpture of 
Phidias, or the architecture of the cathedral of 
Rheims, and that is an historic atmosphere in which 
the valour of men and women will forever be en- 
shrined amid the stars of night, and in a cry for 
vengeance that has sobbed itself through pain and 
fear into the tender smile of experience which asks 
only that the present may be understood so that the 
past may be forgotten, and as the future becomes the 
present, that vengeance may be transformed into love. 

Sappho. 
Reincarnation 

Moses, one day when he was no longer the Moses 
of earth, but a dweller in heaven, called his son 



290 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Gershom to his side. There is record of Moses 
speaking in this way: 

"My son, you are about to leave the plane of 
heaven, descend to earth, clothe yourself in a body 
of the physical world and dwell among the earthly 
people. My boy, go. Your mission will be revealed 
to you years after you arrive on earth." 

And the boy shed many tears and said: 

"Father, tell me my mission now. Why must I 
go?" 

The father said: 

"You will meet one on the earth plane who will re- 
veal to you your mission." 

Then Gershom went to sleep and wakened an in- 
fant on the earth plane. It was not wise that his 
should be a home of luxury in a school of ease, and so 
somehow he grew up. He met one, a great one, who 
revealed to him his mission, and he learned that it 
was to interpret the language of inspiration for the 
people of an epoch. He was born for this, reincar- 
nated for this, even as many are born for the higher 
work of God. All the world should help each soul 
that comes into it to do the work of all the world. 

But the tragedy of souls that are reincarnated, even 
as it was the tragedy of the return of Gershom to 
earth, is that most people make it almost impossible 
for them to do their work. The reincarnated soul is 
a sensitive one, and sometimes feels that the earth is 
a jungle. Souls of earth, be gentle, reserved, con- 
siderate, and circumspect. With infinite labour you 
protect paintings, buildings, books. You are for- 
ever at work making more secure treasure-chambers 



LIFE PHASES 291 

in which to protect the valuables of materialism. It 
is far more important that you study how to protect 
human souls, for you never know what master you 
have with you in the crude soul-form of human flesh. 
Make, then, all the world a home. Think of all 
men as brothers, and soon they will be. If you do 
not, souls will not seek to reincarnate on the earth, 
and many ages will go by before another Gershom 
comes to you. 

Coleridge. 
Delicacy 

The method by which beauty in the form of woman- 
hood clothes herself in the garments of a splendid 
character is by adorning herself with qualities of 
purity, idealism, religion, love and, above all, calm- 
ness. Beauty is serenity. Both in art and litera- 
ture, a beautiful mood or person is one action painted 
or depicted so that one important incident is per- 
manently presented to the understanding. Be calm 
enough then in your important moods so to thrill 
them with intensity that they are finished with a 
fragile delicacy, like the faint odour of lavender that 
one sometimes enjoys when reading again a love 
letter written to one when young. 

There is a maiden, pensive, gentle and kind who is 
beautiful in an ethereal way; who though physically 
frail, meets smilingly the rigours of a material life. 
Brother, Sister, your soul is a voice of God that 
speaks to you. The true heaven is your mind. You 
people it with stars of friendship. So build the 
heaven-sky of your life that the maiden of delicacy 



292 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

may come and live in the sky of your heart, a quiet, 
calm, delicate star, a jewel of the heavens which will 
adorn your life with colour. But delicacy can come 
only where calmness reigns, for delicacy is the poetry 
of might. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

'Renunciation 

There was joy in gala attire one day palpitating 
limpidly as joy only could dance a dance of faint 
breath when she was a-holiday-making. Venice was 
happy. Gondolas like swans moved over the lagoons 
and happy lovers told the eternal story of love to 
beautiful maidens while the guitars and voices sang 
of a deeper love than the voice can tell. They both 
loved, she and he, so devotedly that there were no 
hours, and time for them had not been born. 

In the beginning, such love is always selfish. It 
lives only for its own way and itself alone. So she 
and he drew curtains of crepe cloth over all people 
and objects. They were their own music, their own 
soul, and their own love ; but they were happy. 

One day when she and he were floating in a gon- 
dola together, he said: 

"My heart is broken." And she said: 

"Then pull back that curtain and let me see what 
broke your heart, though my love were Aphrodite 
and all fair women melted into one to be the nectar 
of your life." 

So they drew back the curtain just a little, just the 
width of a butterfly's wing, and they saw in the 
cathedral at midnight a maiden kneeling at the altar, 



LIFE PHASES 293 

illumined by moonlight that with cold colour pene- 
trated a stained glass window. Her breasts were 
bare, her garments sprinkled with mud, her hair di- 
shevelled, and blood dripping from her lips. The 
maiden in the gondola exclaimed : 

"She's praying at the altar and calling for you!'* 
And he said: 

"Yes, you tore me from her, yet I love you." 
Then he pulled back the curtain, and they floated in 
a gondola in the moonlight. She was weeping and 
he buried his face in the arms of night. Audibly, not 
a word vibrated the outward air, but within himself 
he confessed that he had allowed passion to steal an- 
other woman's love, and he had crushed it like flowers 
are crushed when an army treads over a flower-bed, 
and she silently with no outward murmur of the 
thought within, entered the cathedral of his sin and 
heard his confession. 

Then she prayed, prayed that he, the man, might 
sleep, if only for a moment, in the gondola. And he 
slept. Then she rose — leapt, and the waters forever 
will respect the music of her suppressed moan as she, 
from a low lif e, awakened in a higher. He awakened 
and she was gone. And he said: "The first maiden 
gave to me the supreme self-sacrifice, and the second 
was a renunciation of all that she had and was in this 
world for me." Then in a moment he entered the 
gloom of impenetrable night, and there for an age he 
remained until he learned that he himself had as 
much as either of the maidens to renounce. He 
learned from both of them this greatest lesson : True 
sacrifice and renunciation is living your life so that 



294 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

you neither require nor do you give a sacrifice, a re- 
nunciation in a world where these words have become 
nought through lack of meaning. 

Shelley. 

Ambition 

How strange is that urge that causes one to be 
ambitious! And yet, is it strange after all? The 
books of history shower us with stories of war-power. 
I think ambition would be a magnificent point from 
which to start the march of life if one could only leave 
ambition behind and at night bivouac on the sleep- 
ing field of the ideal, for then, when the bugles of 
morning awaken him, he finds himself a soldier in 
the army of humanity. 

I found myself one day emperor of France. I 
shall never forget the thousand leagues of snow, the 
fields and rivers of ice and the march to Moscow. 
How my heart thrilled before the eagles of France 
and the inspiration of the tricolor when, with a strong 
and brave army, we marched from France to Rus- 
sia. I live again now, as I shall always live, the 
horrors of that march. I shall regret like the moan 
of a sepulchral bell that I, Napoleon Buonaparte, 
led the army of France on the great march of death, 
my chief general — Ambition. The ambition in me 
led me, with fixed resolve and without pity, to see 
my army, as we advanced towards Moscow, melt with 
disease and death like snow in the rays of fire. Still 
we marched. 

We were fired by ambition and valour, but our foes 
were disease, hunger and the enemy. Why did we 



LIFE PHASES 295 

enter Moscow? Humble the Slavs? I said ambition. 
Was it to make any one happier? France greater? 
I must say "no" to the first question, and to the sec- 
ond, "only in part." 

My chief desire was to write myself in history as 
Napoleon the Great! the man who had conquered 
nations, and out of the wreck of countries built an 
empire. It seems like a dream now, how in a fort- 
ress, some aides de camp went to sleep with me at 
Moscow, and then a wild cry of fire was heard, and 
in an instant the whole city was swept and engulfed 
in a sea of flame. Yet I was unmoved, I and the 
general I followed — my ambition. 

A few more battles! I return to France. More 
bloodshed! The battle of Waterloo! I am defeated 
by the British. Exile and St. Helena and a fond 
adieu to la belle France. Still I follow my general 
— the leader, Ambition. Then death and a long so- 
journ in the valley of contemplation, till I ascertain 
that the one cursed leader I must part with is my 
ambition. I longed on earth, through my ambition, 
to be called the great Napoleon. Now I have 
learned that my ambition was a serpent, and that 
true greatness in the history of any world is to be 
known as a gentle-man. 

To war-lords of the earth ; to exiled monarchs with- 
out a country; to the leaders of the people in offices 
of power, I say: If you have the slightest element 
of an unworthy ambition in you, remember that your 
ambition cannot steal the wealth of life from the peo- 
ple without making you a culprit doomed to expiate 
vour sin up to a point where both earth and heaven 



290 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

are appeased through your bitter remorse, your pur- 
gatorial purification. I, Napoleon, solemnly warn 
all war-lords, monarchs, demagogues that there is no 
satisfaction to be derived from false ambition until 
the God of love is satisfied that you are no longer 
ambitious. 

Napoleon Buonapabte. 






THE THREE POWERS 

A Psychic Tragedy in Three Acts 

The drama which follows is one of the most in- 
teresting and mysterious phases of our psychic work. 
It was received by us as an impromptu story, the 
three several acts being communicated in three suc- 
cessive meetings. The drama stirred much thought 
and discussion among the members of the Inner Cir- 
cle because of its form, suggestive both of the Greek 
drama and the English mystery play. The pic- 
turesque setting in old Italy leads one to place its 
time relation in the age of the Medici, yet this is not 
definitely stated by the author. The dramatist prob- 
ably intended this omission as well as that of his or 
her own identity to enhance the value of the teach- 
ing to modern readers. 



297 



DRAMATIS PERSONAE 

In the order of their entrance 
to the play 

Albiano, a Florentine noble. 
Enqttirio, his friend. 
Religio, an Italian orator. 
Materialism. 

The Chief Magistrate oe Florence. 
Verna, daughter of Albiano. 
Bernice, mother of Verna. 
Civilization, a woman orator. 
Servant and Spectators. 



298 



THE THREE POWERS 299 

Scene: Florence; an isle in the Mediterranean, and the 
heaven sphere. 

THE THREE POWERS 
A tragedy 

ACT I 

Scene I 

Scene: A room in the house of Albiano of Florence. 
Albiano and Enquirio seated before the hearth- fire in large 
chairs. 

Time: Seven o'clock in the evening. 

Albiano: Friend, great is my delight in the presence 
of two warmths, the warmth of this hearth and the warmth 
of your heart. It is an hour before we listen to the oration 
of Religio. Tell me of this man. Who is he? Where does 
he come from ? What is that strange Herculean hold he has 
upon the popular mind? 

Enquirio: Nay, Albiano; not the sway he has over the 
popular mind alone. His eyes are piercing worlds. His 
arms, the two halves of the universe. His character is like 
the jaws of a vise. His grasp of all that is real in the 
populace is as strong as a million nations made one. 

Alb. : True, Friend, you have met this man, and heard 
him speak. I but ask you to report him to me. I know 
the enthusiasm of your nature. Are you not, my friend, 
lost in an endless maze of beclouded vision in your inter- 
pretation of the new leading personal power, as such power 
is concentrated in the form of man? 

Enq. : It lacks but half an hour when we to the forum 
will repair, and we shall hear and see and feel, thundering 
from the lips of Religio, words which also see and hear and 



300; BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

thunder. But before we go, I would a divine tale unfold. 
Listen to me! 

Last night my daughter came and kissed me saying: 
"Father, this is the night of the carnival. I will not be home 
until two bells are tolled." She was my daughter. Nature 
must have exhausted all pigments and dissolved all pearls, 
and decided that in such an one beauty like the beauty of 
hidden love shone forth. She was dressed as sometimes 
perfect clouds dress the sky. An adornment of perfection! 
I said within my soul : "Here's youth and beauty. To the 
carnival she is going. Each moment, adding up the hours, 
will be to her a regret because so soon the time passes, and 
she will not be home till the last stretched-out second." My 
friend, only an hour wheeled by and my daughter was home 
again. On each cheek, drops of tears, a wrinkled brow, an 
amazed look, countenance as white as frozen snow. 
"Father," she said, "I was at the carnival but a moment. 
We were making ready for the grand masquerade dance, 
when a group of persons all intent on listening to a speaker 
attracted me. I too went and listened. They said his name 
was Religio." 

"My daughter, you remind me of your mother," I said, 
"when she came one day from the church trembling with the 
consuming inner light, for the first time lit through pain 
and fear." 

"Father," she said, "that is how I feel." 

I said to her: "What did you hear? What did Religio 
say to the merry-makers?" 

She commenced to speak, and then, O God, my friend, 
she fell down and seemed to me like one dead. (Agitated.) 

Alb. : Come, my friend, calm yourself. 

Enq. : It lacks now but a little time and we too shall hear 
this man, Religio, whose words are fire, whose treasured 
wisdom knows not exhaustion, whose teaching is the voice 
pf a whole age and whose audience is every human soul. 



THE THREE POWERS 301 

Alb. : Your arm, Enquirio, I link with mine. Our cloaks 
are on. Let us to the forum go. (Exeunt.) 

Scene II 

The Forum of Florence. 

Voices of a vast multitude are heard. Excitement every- 
where. Albiano and Enquirio seat themselves in the fourth 
row from the front. About ten thousand standing and 
seated, and feverishly watching for the entrance of the great 
Italian orator. 

Time — eight m the evening. 

Albiano: Never before have I seen such an audience as 
this. An irresistible power must have entered every home 
in Florence and escorted the people to this place. We have 
here a great assemblage of artisans, doctors, professors, 
teachers, artists, litterateurs and priests. How can one 
mortal man, with throat and lips and teeth, even though he 
has a golden tongue, speak to this multitude? Calm this 
populace? Nay, it is a miracle, if he to them but a single 
sentence speak which they with ears will heed. 

(Religio enters. A hush of deathlike stillness falls on the 
people. Religio speaks.) 

Religio : Vast concourse of human souls and divine minds, 
through me will speak the message of an age. You who 
have read your histories and pondered on them must know 
that there is a collective universal soul. You know that 
sometimes, when purpose is born from great necessity, a 
voice through one man doth speak to us what is only an 
echo, and a clear one, and becomes a torrent of words as 
one world comes in contact with another world, so that both 
worlds understand. 

I perceive that some of you mock me. 'Tis mockery if 
you close your ears. While I speak, I forget that I am 
here. You can listen only when you forget that both you 



302 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

and the speaker are here. I who address you am Religion. 
You who face me are Materialism. But you say I am a 
man. I reply all religion is contained in man. You say 
we are only men. I say you made Materialism. Then Ma- 
terialism took a cruel revenge and made you — what you are. 

If you hear words to-night that scale the protecting walls 
of your hardened nature, it is because that Love which never 
sleeps, and is called God, has implanted within the life of 
every world a fact which is evident everywhere, the fact that 
God's voice is an athlete ever running neck to neck with 
the crimes of your times, and when the hour has arrived will 
stretch forth and distance them apace and cross before you 
the throne-line of victory. 

Your selfishness has put rottenness into your courts of 
law. Your factories and workshops are places where the 
voice of justice is not heard because mechanical wheels roar 
and scream like frightened thieves when caught. Your 
churches are places where wealth, once a week, is placed on 
display, while the narcotic words of the priest lull the senses 
of the people to sleep. Your education is for the wealthy. 
The poor are told about the splendid things in the books, 
but your economic system has arms that reach out forbid- 
dingly while you say to the poor : "Stand back! Standoff!" 

I perceive that you are now asking: "If this vast audi- 
ence represents and personifies Materialism, and you the one 
lone voice representatively speak for Religion, is it your fell 
purpose to damn us, insult us, make us bow our heads in 
shame? Verily, there is unrest in all Italy because of the 
things you teach." You ask: "What is it, Religio, that 
you demand of us? Is it revolution? Is it death and blood? 
Why will you not leave us alone? We live in happiness, in 
wealth and luxury. We have our palaces and our univer- 
sities. We have developed the arts. In invention we are 
active. We have asylums for the insane, hospitals for the 
sick. We fought in a mighty war and we found a genera- 



THE THREE POWERS 303 

tion of heroes. O Religio, in the pealing, tearing thunder 
of your denunciation, what is it you ask that will appease 
you?" 

Generation of materialists: that which Religio asks for; 
is so simple, and at first blush, negligible, that you will say, 
"The archery of his thought has behind it a crude marksman. 
His arrow tumbles in the air." Materialism, you have no 
brother. You have but self, and self with one object — pos- 
session and might and power all for self. You know not 
what a brother is. You think you do. Rut here before me 
I see the rich in splendour seated. The wealthy taking first 
place. Rack in the rear are many aged men in the decrepi- 
tude of their last days. Standing, they lean upon a staff, 
while here are many gallant youths, not chivalrously gallant, 
but rallant only in that which money buys. 

Here before me I find many classes, castes and distinc- 
tions, for in this way materialism deals out a false justice. 
You say I am an agitator. I am an agitator, agitated to 
this thought by your pomp and lust and despair. Some in- 
dividuals before me are noble men. Men who are loved by 
God and who love their God. Rut the hell-like horror of 
your age is seen the clearer by the contrast with divine in- 
dividuals. Materialism, until you become a brother in obe- 
dience to the long lost religion, do not sit upon the mush- 
room fancy of an individual's merit and think that a prop 
of strength for an age. 

{Voices heard everywhere objecting in subdued tones J) 

I perceive that my words hurt you. You object, you call 
yourselves worthy citizens. And yet I see before me a hun- 
dred men who would tear me limb from limb, stab me with 
a thousand piercing blows, yet you call yourselves noble men, 
cultured men, strong men and true. Forsooth, I am mis- 
taken ! Rut yesterday I stood beside a market stall. There 
I overheard in conversation, the chief magistrate of this 
city. Ah, he beckons me to dosist. Shall I desist, O people? 



304 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

(Great roar of voices heard: Go on; go on!) 

After this my address, if I go on, there be those who will 
cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, nail me to 
the death-tree; yet will I go on. 

Beside the market stall, obscured by some baskets of fruit, 
I heard what was not intended for private or public ears 
though somewhat in a loud voice — I have here notes of the 
words as spoken to two or three. I will read them. 

"I am aware that the people do not longer desire me to 
hold office as chief magistrate. They have discovered that I, 
having given the keys to my son, he has stolen a large sum 
of money from the public treasury. These things are done 
all the time. Honour in this commonwealth is a thing of 
money. Only hermits, living in foul wet caves, on herbs 
and grass, can live the life religious. So Roderigo, Maphini 
and Pimero, I commission you and will pay you with gold, 
to assassinate Albiano and Enquirio to-night. I will send 
a note to both of them to come and visit me in my home, 
and as they pass by the street with the rounded corner, where 
all is dark as deep night, stab them to death. Have not 
for them the mercy of a dog." 

(Audience rises. Pandemonium ensues. Religio stands 
unmoved with folded arms. Albiano, speakmg to Enquirio, 
says : "I will mount my seat and endeavour to calm the mur- 
derous voice we hear. He does so, and after a prolonged 
effort, secures silence. Then Religio is agam heard to speak. ) 

Rel. : I came not here to provoke a mutiny. I came to 
prove that Religion is a holy light and where it is directed 
all sin is revealed. I pray those who are gentle, those who 
are noble, those who are moved by this orator dying on the 
rostrum before your eyes — for when Religion speaks 
through one man with all her force and all her right, that 
man must consume his life. He burns up what on earth he 
is. For the soul is heard in this way only when the fuel of 
its light is the physical life that wanders up regions of air 



THE THREE POWERS 305 

to a higher plane where the life physical is transfused into 
the spirit. 

So I give myself and die before your eyes. You would 
listen to the words of a dying man though he were a galley- 
slave. The meanest of you would act thus. Many of you 
are honourable and virtuous men. I represent the cause 
of our Father God. That cause is Religion. Religion is 
that in life which will teach you how to replace materialistic 
thought with spiritual inspiration. It is that thought of 
the divine which shines through the eyes of the honest man 
and woman. It is that consideration which forever would 
prevent chief magistrates from conserving their honour with 
the power of money. It is that gentle spirit of manhood 
that would prevent the youthful and strong from being 
seated in a place such as this while the aged and tottering 
stand. It is that ethical love which would make it impossible 
for an impure mind to hear music, see art, do a noble deed, 
love another. Materialism is a base and devilish deceiver. 
It makes you think you can fool your soul and do evil things 
to your profit. Religion is a revealing light which throws 
into all light the things you desire, the things you do, the 
things you see, the things you know, as a million planets 
and stars mingle their light with that of one weak hardly 
illumined star; so that all things are performed in light 
which is Religion; in love, in beauty and in God. 

Brothers, but a year ago this fair city was stricken with 
the plague. "Black fever," said the leeches. The. terrible 
scourge carried off your babes, brothers, fathers and 
mothers, your dearest and most prized. In that little silent 
commonwealth of the dead sleep those you loved who loved 
you. Is there one in all this vast concourse who would say 
that the truth I speak is not voiced by that common- 
wealth of the dead? From the commonwealth of all the 
dead who have died — and all in some way were related to 
you — comes this message. 



306 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

"Physical life is a living candle. It sheds but a fitful 
glare. Daily it burns until even itself is consumed, and then 
the knell is sounded of the hour when for each of you comes 
the age-long process, a four walled wooden house, a hole in 
the ground, the weeping mourners, and then another genera- 
tion walks over the place where you physically have gone to 
sleep forever." 

Now I perceive that you weep. You weep not alone. My 
tears mingle with yours and they float down the river of 
love together. I am something of the voice of religion, and 
I have caught your thought. I know you think I am too 
much of the divine to be constituted in a man. You think 
there is between your souls in the physical life and me too 
vast a stretch of difference. 'Tis indeed so. Another must 
come between myself and you. Our sister Civilization must 
stand between Materialism and Religion. 

Religion speaks only in hours of death — hours like this 
when the beast in Materialism is dying. You to-night, my 
friends, have seen Religion officiate in the death struggle of 
an age of materialism. In a moment I will go. Go where? 
To bed and to sleep? Or will you tear me like lions in the 
Coliseum devouring Christians? You weep, so I conclude 
that I shall sleep, perhaps for an hour or two safely pro- 
tected only by the drawn curtains of my bed. To-morrow 
come to this forum again. My place will be taken by an- 
other we call Civilization, and she will voice the constitution 
of love by which individuals are made god-men, by which 
nations flourish, millions have a religion, and empires rule 
many nations under the guiding voice of God. 

(Religio is seen to leave the -rostrum escorted by friends. 
The vast audience disperses with heads bowed.) 

Curtain 
End of First Act. 
Received February 20, 1920. 



THE THREE POWERS 307 

ACT II 

Scene I 

A reception room in the castle of Albiano, Midnight, 
Most of the candles extinguished. The others throw sil- 
houetted shadows here and there. Backgammon board with 
the pieces spilled on the floor. Gorgeous robes thrown over 
antique chairs. The room a place of splendour, but careless- 
ness evident everywhere through the appearance of objects. 

(Note: For one and a half minutes after curt am rises, 
only the interior of the room is seen.) 

Enter Verna, daughter of Albiano, dressed in night-robes, 
hair down. She walks silently, seats herself on a cushion 
near logs on the hearth, nearly consumed. She bows her head 
and soliloquizes. 

Verna : Yesterday I went to the home of the soothsayer, 
who is called a witch. In her presence there was the silence 
of the tomb. While there I espied the magic things by which 
she performs her conjurations. — All was still. Now I find 
myself in this spacious room alone, yet my heart beats with 
blows louder than the angry waters of Naples' Bay when 
they groan and are torn apart by the strength of the shore. 

I have come here because the soothsayer said that here 
after midnight I would meet my mother. How strange and 
silent all is in this room. I thought before I came — think- 
ing as I could with a dazed brain, a heart that reeled, a 
soul that fell — that being in this place for such a purpose, 
I would be terrified and cry out for my father's servants 
to come. 

'Tis strange a calmness suffuses my being. I am one of 
the objects at rest in this place. I have lost all sense of 
identity. I am part of this hour. Maria! O Deus! What 
is this self-possession? I did not expect this experience. I 



308 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

would rather crave fear, excitement, anything to release me 
from this awful silence. 

But hark ! Ah, now I am released, for through the open 
doors and windows I hear the Te Deum being chanted. I 
hear the choir in that sacred place softly singing the hymn 
of rest. So I will meet whatever may ensue with that poise 
which is born of love. 

Ah, what is that which I behold in the corner of the 
room? — White clouds! — How strangely they move! — The 
soothsayer, the witch, told me my mother would descend 
from heaven this night, clothe herself in garments of the 
earth and meet me, her daughter. 

(The daughter moves in the direction where vapoury 
clouds are seen to form into the materialization of the human 
body. The mother, Bernice, materializes and speaks to her 
daughter, Verna.) 

Bernice : My precious child ! My little baby girl ! My 
all ! Sweet, dear, pure angel of the earth. You have called 
me from the Elysian world. I have come. Part of the rea- 
son for your call is clear to me. The other part is an ob- 
scuration. 

Verna, my child, there were powers which prepared you 
to meet me in this room as fell the hour of my coming. 
Verna, you love. You have given all but that which is your 
most sacred physical possession to Virgil, the youth of 
Napoli. I know all this because you told me so in your; 
prayers. O Verna, my child, perhaps it were better had 
you not called me from the other world, for to-night I must 
unfold to you that which will be a knife-blade heated white- 
hot which will both sear and cut that portion of my own 
heart which is my child, my Verna. 

Verna, death compensates for all nature*s cruel blows. 
Death reveals (as when the clouds have rolled from the val- 
leys at dawn and the mountain heights are seen) many 
strange things which in the low-lands of your earth plane life 



THE THREE POWERS 309 

you fail to understand. When I inflict, as in a moment I 
must, Verna, that blow which will be worse to you than to 
a mother the loss through death of her first son; than to 
the deceived maiden, the surrender of the beauty of her 
purity to the disguised lust of a fiend in flesh — more hellish 
is that which I must do — telling to my own daughter, my 
jVerna, who has prayed me from heaven. Verna, my baby, 
I would tell you what I must in the presence of your father, 
my husband of the earth, Albiano. The forces around me 
now are sufficient to last one hour, and at the expiration, I 
to the other worlds must journey, never again to be seen by 
eyes of earth, even though they be those of my daughter. 
Such an hour means to you and Albiano what ten centuries 
mean in the life of a nation. 

Ver. : Mother ! Mother ! Father knows naught of this. 
Can I call him to this place to speak to one he thinks is 
dead? Beckon to him? Signal to him to come to this room 
where nature has — oh, I am so ignorant of these things ! — ■ 
torn down the marble doors of the mausoleum, removed the 
cover from the casket, caused your flesh to grow again upon 
bones that for ten years have slept in a sea of tears? 
Mother, I do not understand. Is this real? Is it you? Am 
I here, or do I but dream? dream of you, of Virgil, and my 
father ? 

Bee.: Verna, by the purity of my love for you, my 
daughter, by the power that is given me from heaven, I bid 
you summon your father, my earth-world husband to this 
room. Already moments of the hour have gone, and each 
moment is nature's unbreakable seal on what I am allowed 
to tell you before you come to me in heaven. 

( Verna rises, sways, breathes deeply, looks with intent gaze 
upon her mother, then without another word quietly leaves 
the room. The mother, meanwhile, sings an old Italian ber- 
ceuse, one she had often sung when cradling to sleep the little 
fhUd, Verna, AU the candles have burned out. The light in 



310 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

the room is a super-radiance from Bernice. A full mi/nute is 
allowed to elapse, Albiano and Verna enter.) 

Albiano: But, my child, my Verna, you have only been 
dreaming. I have come in answer to your prayer. My child, 
I will call a leech. This room is bare, and yet, over there 
by that statue what light is that I behold, the moon? 

Ver. : Father, that light is mother. Accustom your eyes 
to the light, and no longer will you say Verna dreams. 

(The father utters a piercing cry. God! God! It is! — 
it is my wife! Bernice! Bernice!) 

Ber. : Albiano, husband, peace, peace ! This is no dream, 
no conjuration of the devil. It is but that which you and I, 
Albiano, in the old days, read about in a mystic tale. We 
then called it fiction, an old wives' fancy. Now it is real 
and, Albiano, I have come. 

Alb.: Verna! Bernice! Myself! O God! 

(He moves his hand across his forehead in a despairing, 
uncomprehending manner.) 

Do I dream, or is this the resultant effect of the wines of 
Italy? Bernice! If this is no fancy, then what was the 
name of her whom we paid to leave Florence and go to a 
distant city, there to be lost to all who in this city knew 
her? 

Ber.: Albiano, her name was Ventra, and the name of 
her son — your son, but not mine — was Virgil. 

Ver.: Say not thou, Virgil, Mother! 

Ber.: Yea, Daughter, Virgil! 

Alb. : Bernice ! Verna ! Wife ! Thou art indeed both 
real and tenderly loving to me. In a moment of time some 
minds comprehend eternity. This is such a moment. I see 
it all. Now I know why Jesu and the Father have laid 
bare my sin in this cruel yet loving way for me to behold. 
Bernice! Queen of the only heaven I desire to journey to- 
wards, Verna your daughter is here. By that cunning which 






THE THREE POWERS 311 

is not base, that moves from the soul of a woman that once 
loved a man, and found in the man an unresponsive mon- 
ster, she, when } T ou died, sent me many notes, prayed for 
money; this, in large amounts, I gave her. Then, as when 
entrance makes an aperture in a non-resisting material, and 
the rent is torn longer and wider, her implorations became 
more stringent, until she asked for me, this castle, our titles. 
I never loved her, but in the hot excesses of my Italian 
youth, I robbed her of the first motherhood that belonged 
to another, whom, though she loved, she would not have 
because he was poor and I was rich. Then well nigh twelve 
months ago she sent her son with a note saying that Virgil 
was my son, and this I could not deny. O God, I would that 
I had warned you, Verna, about this, for he who through 
his innocence has won you through your womanhood, my 
God, he is your half-brother ! 

Ber. : Albiano, soon I must journey forever from this 
cursed place. But I would bless it and make it holy before 
I go. Albiano, I loved you with all the action of love, and 
with all the drama of such a love when I called you husband, 
and yet knew, through the transparency of your voluntary 
confession, that you had crucified another woman's soul on 
the cross of the birth of a child of passion. I do not regret 
here one single act of all the hours of our friendship and 
its repressed-maturity love. You by your suffering this 
hour have buried your sin and paid the penalty, and now 
when I return to heaven, rest thou in peace and contentment 
because I go to participate in eternal joy. 

Alb. : Bernice, your words are a mystery. Each one of 
them a mystery. I can understand all but your forgive- 
ness. 

Ber.: (Verna wrings her hands.) See, see, Verna, is over- 
come, she hardly hears nor understands a word. When your 
sin — our secret — was revealed to her, that which I told her 



312 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

must ensue was done. With white-hot words we burned and 
cut her soul. But I will restore her. Hold my hand. 

(Albiano extends his hand which is grasped by Bernice, 
who gently touches Verna on the forehead, Verna becomes 
calm, A smile suffuses her face.) 

Alb. : Verna, in the presence of my hell, the multitudinous 
fiend words of a horrible confession, why dost thou smile? 
And now — this moment! 

Bee.: I told you, Albiano, that this day thou art for- 
given. I go back to the peace of heaven with a joy I never 
knew before. 

Alb. : O night of miracles ! What an hour of mystery ! 
O mystery and miracle ! With my puny brain I do not un- 
derstand. I cannot. 

Ber. : Verna, explain to him, for I see and know what he 
does not perceive. 

Ver. : My mother, Bernice, my father, Albiano, three 
days ago were Virgil and myself in a forest, sitting on a 
flower embroidered bank of a small river. He, holding my 
hand and with bowed head, said: "Verna, by nature I am 
religious. The church of my fathers is calling me. I would 
be a priest, Verna, rosebud of love's heart, child of more 
than earthly beauty. There are two elements both made by 
God" — there and then he tightened his hold on my hand — 
"who holds my destiny. Nature calls me to the church. 
Love would give you to me. I have myself to give to the 
world as a priest. And, O Verna, all that I have to give to 
you is a young man scarcely tutored, and yet one, methinks, 
who loves you in a threefold way. The concentrated love 
of mother, father, and a youth who would be thy husband." 

Mother, you have asked me to speak. Father, you are 
listening? Hear me but a moment longer. That purple day 
drew to a close. How long Virgil spoke to me I do not 
know, but just as one, when tuned to blend with the music 



THE THREE POWERS 313 

of love, hears another sound, so I knew only that Virgil was 
speaking, and even nature left us alone. This he said to 
me: "Fairest daughter of Florence, I said to myself after 
you had accepted me as the companion of your life, that 
this day I would offer to you, Verna, something greater 
than myself. You are to decide my course in life — your 
life and my own." Father, Mother, I was weak then. I was 
a woman. I wanted Virgil. But in an instant I saw the 
quality of his genius, and I knew Italy needed him, and I 
must give him to Italy. 

But I was flesh, and weak and frail, and I prayed him to 
give me time. And Virgil said: "Verna, some prophetic pre- 
vision within my soul informs me that God will give you 
strength to be guided along the path of saintship.'* 

Father, Mother, God has guided. A thousand times has 
he blessed me. Now that I know that Virgil is my half- 
brother, I give him to the church and to Italy. I do so 
willingly, serenely, God-strengthened for the ordeal. 

Ber. : Albiano, Verna, it wants but a minute, and then I 
must go and be forever gone from this world where the 
earth is a set stage, each life a drama, and the deepest plots 
are the simplest things of the common action of every hid- 
den love experience. I go, I depart ! And your comfort is, 
you come, you come! You will come, both of you, to the 
place where I go. Then we will continue, not a broken off 
love of mother from her daughter, of wife from her husband, 
— but the soul of me will await with patient joy the time 
when your souls will with mine live in the one Soul, the love 
and life of God. 

Curiam 

End of Second Act 
March 5, 1920. 



314 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

ACT III 

Scene I 

In the dining-room of Albiano 9 s castle, TJie room is fur- 
nished with rich Italian furniture. A breakfast table is 
spread near a large bay window, which is open. In several 
cages canaries are sweetly singing. From, out side the songs 
of birds are heard. Enter a servant who makes preparation 
for the breakfast meal. He retires. Enter Albiano, who 
seats himself at the head of the table. He sees Verna enter- 
i/ng, stands, and waits till she is seated, then seats himself. 

T'vme: morning. 

Albiano: Verna, my precious one, hardly yet have the 
scenes of last night been dispelled by nature in her summer 
joy. I perceive by the paleness of your face and the age 
that has come to you through a life lived in a few brief 
hours, that you arise from the strangeness of it all changed 
in face and life. I pray thee, Verna, child of the skies, par- 
take of your morning meal and let earth food dull the keen- 
wrought edge of your sensibilities. Verna, in a moment we 
will talk of lighter things. This I want though. I want it 
to be known to one who to me is heaven and life and wife 
and daughter embodied — you, that your father Albiano 
knows that his little daughter, Verna, has honoured all her 
ancestors, nay, all the greatness of Italian history, by one 
single act, being as great as the most supernatural crisis 
ever was when heaven and earth met together for the pur- 
poses of God. 

Verna : Father, speak to me not about such things. The 
little act I was a party to was not renunciation. It was 
that of a woman who, already aware that she must not have 
him, was finding a way to release him ; and so my small pain 
gave Virgil to the church and to Italy. 

Alb>. : Verna, let us partake of our meal in silence. 



THE THREE POWERS 315 

(They eat in silence for some moments. After the meal is 
finished, servants enicr. Verna and her father, arm in arm, 
walk out of the room.) 

Curtam 
Scene H 

Garden of the castle. Verna and Albiano seated on a 
garden bench. 

Albiano: Verna, my daughter, what wild-jangling words 
are these that you have been speaking tome? You say you 
are not long for this world ; that before you go to the place 
where your mother lives, you would do some signal service 
for the people. Last night, O child, Bernice spoke to me 
words that I understand here — not there. 

(When he says "here," he presses his left hand to his 
heart; when "there," his right hand is laid on his forehead.) 
They are like trying to crush a fragile flower into a rock. 
Veena : Father, how old am I ? 

Alb.: Fair daughter, but eighteen summers have gone 
by since that July day when thy little face first touched this 
cheek of mine with a kiss that will remain till all the worlds 
pass away in a puff-cloud of oblivion. 

Vee. : Father, this world holds for me not one thing of 
interest. Before I knew that Virgil was my brother, I gave 
him all, and yet, not all ; I gave him that which an unnatural 
consummation caused to take from me the essence of my 
being, and now, this is a wild world, a cruel world, and I 
know not where love will e'er be found again. Father, your 
daughter Verna lives now in a body made of the things of 
earth, yet her soul is not here, it is with mother. 

Alb.: This is but a reaction from last night's super- 
natural spell. It will wear away, my daughter ; it will wear 
away. I look at those eyes of yours. They are calm and 
bright. It is not what I see in your eyes that agonizes my 



316 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

soul, but what I feel, Verna, even as you feel, even an im- 
pending doom, an awful sunset withoul resurrection that is 
about to engulf us. Verna, I must be stern with thee. This 
is what we pay for tampering with evil spirits. 

Ver.: Father, last night Mother came from heaven and 
spoke to you— made a great wrong right, and now you deny 
her? 

Ai>b. : Nay, my daughter, nay. I said I must be stern 
with you. I said words I did not mean, for I know that in 
the hour of last night I beheld the materialization of a be- 
ing which was Bernice. Still, Verna, I would save you from 
the unnatural effect of such a visit from one who came from 
the world of the heavens to visit us again. 

Ver.: Father, can you not give me to Mother and let 
me go to her in peace? You gave me Virgil, then Mother 
took him away from me, and I gave him to the church and 
to Italy. 

Alb.: My daughter, why speak of death in this beau- 
tiful setting of a summer day? Now I will be stern. You 
speak of death, Verna. Would you not live for me* because I 
love you? Because you are fair? Have all that wealth can 
give — castles, lands, power? All this is yours. Verna, 
live for me, and in a few months when time has repaired the 
broken bridges of your life, there will walk over them into 
the castle of your heart some noble Italian youth who will 
claim you for his queen. Then, Verna, when these locks 
have turned white, and these shoulders bend like the branch 
upon that tree, and the decrepitude of old age gives me stif- 
fened joints, a cane, a servant, to help my tottering steps, 
in the musing hours of regret and longing for youth, will you 
not, my daughter, be there to give me the happiness to see 
and love your children and know that my daughter is a 
mother of Italy? 

Ver. : My father, dearly do I love you, and more dearly 



THE THREE POWERS 317 

still do I love you even though I die, as I will, if I leave you 
to go to Mother. Remaining, Mother can never be happy 
because I remain in grief, and this is just neither to Mother 
nor to you, my father. 

(Albiano sits with head bowed on his hands, thinking 
deeply. Suddenly he straightens up.) 

Alb.: I have it! I have pondered on it. There will 
speak this night in the forum — the same place where Religio 
addressed us — one who comes from Norway, called Civiliza- 
tion. She will with words and thought measure forth the 
greatness of an age in an oration which will show how to 
marry Materialism to Religion and make a great Civiliza- 
tion out of the union. Verna, this I propose: If after 
hearing Civilization, you still resolve to die, then I will im- 
pose no obstacle, but will take you to our island in the 
Mediterranean, and there in the villa leave you to Maria, 
God, heaven and your mother. 

Ver. : Father, dear, we will go to the forum to-night. 
Gaily I will deck myself with flowers, even as I now take 
this rose and place it on your breast, for, Father, I have 
seen and known what, perhaps, I alone could know about 
Mother, Virgil and yourself. They have taught me this: 
that some souls belong more truly to their age by the in- 
fluence they have when exerted from the heaven world. Some 
saviours live in heaven and some on earth. Virgil I know 
will live on earth and be an honour to Italy. I would be 
with Mother in heaven and send back those benign influ- 
ences which form the substance of the inspiration of the 
people. But hark! if to-night Civilization explains an age 
to me worthy in which to live, then I remain until this phys- 
ical frame lays itself down and forever goes to sleep. Here 
upon your cheek I kiss the confirmation of our resolve. I 
will away to dress, and you, my father, be happy as before. 

(Exit Verna.) 



318 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

(Curtain slowly descends as Albiano, with bowed and shak- 
ing head, murmurs m words scarcely audible:) 

Alb.: I do not understand. I do not understand. 

Scene III 

The Forum of Florence. A large audience there. 
Time: early evening. Two spectators heard speaking. 

First Spectator: But you say Civilization is a woman! 
Has she a message? Has she power? 

Second Spectator : I know only what I have heard. But 
I heard directly from one who heard her, and he said : "She 
is an angel and she speaks the music of her soul, yet me- 
thinks it is soul-music." 

First Spec. : Strange ! Strange ! First it is the man Re- 
ligio who unsettles all the nation; and now a woman comes 
to calm the storm. 

(Subdued talking is heard everywhere, and m the distance 
is heard above the talking an advancing group of people 
singing an old Italian air, accompanied by guitars. Enter 
Albiano and Verna.) 

Albiano: Verna, we are here. 

Verna: But, Father, not alone, for there came with us 
the spirit of Mother. 

(The magnificos and great citizens in robes of state seat 
themselves on the platform. Then is seen a tall, stately 
woman in a plain white robe, around which is a black girdle 
at the waist, and on whose bosom is the crucifix. She is 
standing on the rostrum about to speak to the people.) 

Alb.: Methinks she personifies the beauty and light of 
all the maidens of Italy. 

Ver. : She reminds me of my mother. 
Civilization: People of Italy: Consider the hour in 
which we live. Examine it with wisdom and with depth. We 



THE THREE POWERS 319 

are .in a dangerous hour, and you know as well as I do that 
unless Italy joins industry, poetry, religion, and all the 
arts into one sacred democracy, Italy sprawls in the dust 
and takes her place beside the ruins of Carthage and Baby- 
lon. My people, the tragedy of the situation in which his- 
tory finds our nation is that all nations have been in a simi- 
lar position. They alleviated the terrible national condition 
through temporizing and by the use of expedients, but not 
one was wise enough to take a higher step and become a 
real civilization. 

You know as well as I that this land is rent with feuds; 
that assassination is an hourly occurrence, and that in order 
that a few may become wealthy, a thousand slaves must die. 
'All that I, Civilization, plead for is that you take the ele- 
ments which you possess — and you possess all of them — 
and make of them a nation of industry, education, art and 
religion. 

I will not speak at length to-night. I have spoken a thou- 
sand times to the masses on this subject all over Italy. My 
work is done ; yours is beginning. You have had great reli- 
gious leaders pray with you, implore you, weep with you, 
suffer with you. Art has reminded you that I can be beau- 
tiful. Literature has reminded you that this nation can 
give wisdom to all the world. In this last moment of my 
public work I do not speak so much as act. I take Material- 
ism by the hand; I grasp the hand of Religion, and here 
before your eyes I see them married in the employment of 
God, in the face of heaven. If from this union there does 
not come to Italy a nation of work and love, of justice to 
all — of democracy — then this world is hell and ye are all 
citizens of hell. Ye are damned. There, penetrating the 
masks of your white faces, selfishness indicates that ye are 
guilty every one of you, and the sooner each one of you 
crawls along the by-paths from your present life to a life 
more holy the better. 



320 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

You have all that you need to make a great civilization. 
Do it not, and you are damned. Adieu! 

Alb.: Methinks those are hot words, strong words and 
most unfair. 

Ver. : Father, Civilization, for many years, did speak 
through words. To uplift the people, she made them feel 
through her feeling, through the comprehension of her soul, 
and used strong words only to make that feeling felt the 
more. 

Alb. : Daughter, thou appalest me. 

Ver.: Father, now when the moon has ascended, let us 
to the garden, and in the pale and quiet light of night, my 
soul will prepare for departure from the earth. 

Alb.: (Agitated. Aside.) She is bereft of her reason. 
She has no right to say this thing. Heaven forfend me. 
What shaU I do? 

Curtain 

Scene IV 

Garden in Albiano's castle. A bench made bright by 
moonlight — all around it hidden m deep shadows. In the 
distance, a tolling bell is heard. The watchman is heard 
calling: "One bell and all is well in Florence." Verna and 
Albiano slowly walk towards and seat themselves on the 
bench. 

Verna: Here, Father, did I kiss thee, and we pledged 
our resolve. You are a great Father, a brave man. In all 
my young life did I obey thee. Father, you have often 
heeded the weakness of your nature ; now we must be strong 
and true. In this place I kissed the spot upon your cheek 
and made resolve to my vision to adhere. 

Albiano: (Distractedly.) Then, you will die ? You will 
enter the tomb? Kill yourself? Hire assassins to mur- 
der you? From an alchemist obtain poison? What is this 
wild and insane resolve that you hold me to? 



THE THREE POWERS 321 

Ver.: I will not slay myself, Father. In a few days, 
smilingly I will die. 

Alb.: Is my daughter as cruel as hell? Or is life, speak- 
ing through her, unholy and accursed? 

Ver.: It is neither, Father. It is that I am not afraid 
to die. That I despair of the glory of Italy. That I do 
not desire to live in an age which will not use the elements 
we possess to make this an age in which a woman cares to 
live, become a mother and have her children live. 

Alb.: Daughter, art thou not cruel? .Art thou not un- 
natural? 

Ver. : No, not cruel, my father, not even to you in this 
resolve, for you think life long to be enjoyed, and I know 
that none can enjoy our present life, nor should, knowing 
the misery of the people. I am not cruel, my father. I 
will go before you, but know that you will come — come to a 
world where justice is, because only love is breathed there 
by the spirit. 

Alb. : Then, Daughter, I take farewell of thee. I do not 
understand thee, yet thou meetest reason with reason, fact 
with fact, and thou leavest me not an argument. In 
reasoning with thee I am defeated. I confess myself de- 
feated; and because I know not what to do nor say I take 
farewell of thee for a few days. I will go with my friend, 
Defario, to the hunt. If you need me, send a message. If 
thi-s insane resolve is not the miscarriage of a dream, I shall 
be glad, but if thou nearest the point of death, send for me 
if still there is time. I shall not be far away. 

Curiam 

Scene V 

Interior of bedroom m villa located m the isles of the* 
Mediterranean. Verna dy'vng. Leeches and nurses, Albiano 
seated on a stool, holding the hand of Verna. 



322 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

Albiano : So, Daughter, it has come to pass. You sick- 
ened with the plague, not self-inflicted, but perchance caught 
— my God! — from the very fruit I sent thee. Verna, thou 
who out of my soul didst come and now who takest my soul 
away with thee, tell Bernice, my wife, in heaven, that I, Al- 
biano, her husband, soon will join her. 

(A choir is heard singing an Ave Maria.) 

Verna: Do you all hear the hymn? {Many nod yea.) 
Yet on this island there is neither church nor choir. The 
door of heaven is open but an inch, and from it comes a 
celestial song. All of you weep. But why? Entering 
heaven is the greatest joy the soul will ever know. 

( Verna closes her eyes, turns her face to one side. Albiano 
drops her hand which falls by the side of the bed. All in 
the room bow their heads and Albiano's tears stream down 
his face as he says:) 

Alb.: Peace! Peace to her soul! 

Curtain 
Scene VI 

A place in Elysium. Superlatively beautiful mountains. 
Trees that puzzle the eye as to whether they be trees or flow- 
ers. A small lake with a surface of pure silver. Verna and 
Bernice are seen reclining on the shore. 

Bernice: My daughter, my precious little baby, fresh 
from the puzzle of the world of earth. This is heaven, I am 
Mother. There is no death. You suffered just a little in 
the voyage between the two worlds, my darling, just as one 
unused to a rough sea voyage suffers from mal de mer. You 
are living, Verna. Here there is no death, but endlessly 
things to learn, friends to love, and God to know. You 
have walked up Vesuvius' side, been scorched by the belch- 
ing flames just a little, and now you are in heaven. 

Verna : Mother, I understand. This place is not strange 



THE THREE POWERS 323 

to me. I caught in my vision a glimpse of it when Civiliza- 
tion made me feel that which she could not say, though she 
tried. So this place, Mother, is not strange to me. It is so 
beautiful, a pure world! It is not strange, Mother, because 
where you are is home. 

Bee. : Verna, hast thou not one regret, one earth-draw- 
ing thread that draws your mind back again to the home 
that thou didst leave? 

Vee. : Yes, I see, I know, Mother, two regrets, and here 
in my heart is a twin pain ; for there on^ earth I left Virgil 
and my father. I am happy here, Mother, with you, su- 
premely so, but they below do weep and are dire distressed. 

Ber. : Come with me to my home, and there in the room 
of meditation you will hear the prayers of Virgil and our 
Albiano. It is the form of human speech of those who 
have risen to this place. We will converse with them, and 
you shall see them as they really are, not hidden by that 
physical body which is an obstruction, for their souls in 
the astral dress will come to meet us in this heaven. So 
you shall not only hear their prayers and their converse 
with our souls; you shall see them as I see you and you see 
me. It will not harm them to live some time longer on 
earth. Your father has told me already in his prayer that 
he will right the great wrong of his life as far as he can, 
give a home, protection and some love to the mother of Vir- 
gil. Virgil himself, in the room of meditation in our home, 
will tell you that he will ally himself with a hundred thou- 
sand other worthy souls to make for Italy the civilization of 
love, and in this great work he will be happy. 

Mother and daughter arise, walk to where a beautiful lily 
is swaying i/n the wind. The mother lifts the flower gently 
and kisses a petal. Verna does the same. 

Curtain 



The following chapter consists of a message given by 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge to be read at the first of the meet- 
ings held by the Inner Circle in Oddfellows Hall, Bathurst 
Street, Toronto, in response to the wishes of many people 
who craved a more intimate touch with the teaching of the 
Twentieth Plane. 



324 




THE WISDOM OF MYSTERY 

Dear Brothers and Sisters: 

Why should joy and tears, suffering and ease, mis- 
ery and comfort, be inseparable companions? Our 
object is to make this mystery clear, and God's pres- 
ence in the result will make that object holy. 

Light is both subjective and objective. It has an 
internal and external source. 

Light is the positive description that things give 
of themselves to demonstrate the fact of their own 
existence. 

An object, to be real, must be made of that energy 
which corresponds with the energy of your own con- 
sciousness, else there could be no recognition or knowl- 
edge of external things. This is axiomatic. 

Consciousness itself is an all-comprehending fac- 
ulty. Pure Consciousness must of necessity know 
all things. It is the one all-comprehensive active 
illumination whose rays are all-penetrative. 

You ask then: "Have I a consciousness?" Yes, 
you have. 

Then you ask: "Why does not my mind compre- 
hend all things, why is the world in which I live a 
vast collection of a million trees and I a weak child 
wandering among them, knowing little more than 
that I am myself?" 

The trees are there. There is light and shadow 

325 



326 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

because each tree is an infinite mystery and all the 
world is made up of mysteries. 

Dear Souls of the Earth Plane: The darkness 
is necessary. The greatest thing of all for you is 
the light of your own Consciousness. That is God. 

And next to it in greatness is the darkness of 
your thought, for, as in art, it is a law that the more 
intense the light the deeper your shadows. We ex- 
tend this principle into the affairs of human action. 

Suffering, sin, inequality, — these are the shadows 
that must exist in order that there may be light. 

Light is the unshadowed pure phase of the Uni- 
verse which is God. 

All other things, though they emanate from God, 
are shadows in comparison with Him. 

A human being is a shadow, a. reflection, sometimes 
a darkness, and some have been a black despair. 

You cannot hope to lose yourself — dissolve your- 
self in the ocean of God's light, .and become the illu- 
mination He is. 

If you could, your personality would pass into 
nothingness. The Divine would lose a child, for then 
there would not remain a personality — an ego. 

Joy and suffering are inseparable companions, be- 
cause the Divine never desires and never will desire 
to finish His work. 

The unfinished work is darkness. That towards 
which it tends is the light. 

Sin is the unfinished, the darkness, not yet suffi- 
ciently illuminated by the light to* detect its error. 

Some day there will be sufficient light to realize 
that darkness is a more dense, compact form of light, 



THE WISDOM OF MYSTERY 327 

which makes an etheric diffused energy, material 
enough for a foundation that a human being may 
stand on it. 

When you say that some — perhaps you — have 
tasted of bitter dregs that made you feel God to be 
without love, all you did was to withdraw yourself 
into a place of stifling darkness where your soul 
hardly dared to breathe. 

But Light, slowly, lovingly, wandered in, and you 
longed for sweeter, diviner air. You came out of 
your darkness into light. 

Then came the greatest realization that can ever 
come. The suffering forced you to realize darkness 
as a power which through fear, through heroism, 
through necessity, teaches you to walk with God. It 
is God's method of educating the Soul, just as a 
baby learns to stand erect by first creeping. 

These things have I learned through darkness and 
through light. May the light of these thoughts lov- 
ingly penetrate your darkness. 
February 7, 1920. 



The time has come for the teachers of theology, the mas- 
ters, the prophets, the seers of your age, to explain that the 
whole Universe is controlled by natural beneficent law. 

— Paul 



328 






EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 

November 30, 1919 — St. Francis of Assisi 

I would speak as a child in the presence of the 
great, good God of Love. When I was on the earth, 
doves would rest on my outstretched hand, and birds 
would come at my call. 

Consider the greatness of humility. The greatest 
religion of all is just to be gentle — to know all 
there is to know about self-control; to be gentle as 
night when it kisses the cheek of the awakening day. 
I knew the kleison of the gentle touch as my rosary 
sang to me, while I counted the beads one by one. 
Your artificial life, your machinery, your wars, and 
the great engine of your economic system, — these 
are ungentle, while millions are in want. Do things 
the best you can, but do them gently. 

The great soul is never in a hurry; never speaks 
loudly; steps gently. The masters of religion are 
all known by their gentleness. Their movements are 
like the tears of a flower dropt from an almost im- 
perceptible grief. Be gentle if you would be potent. 
In the presence of death, all is desecration save only 
silence and the breath of prayer. 

I had walked one day till my feet were sore and 
bleeding. My clothes were torn, my lips parched, 
my hair dishevelled. The streets were dark. I 
passed the poor abodes of the labourer and the peas- 

329 



330 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

ant. In one was a lighted taper. There was a well 
where anyone might drink. I drank and then lay- 
down on the sward in the meadow. Soon I was 
asleep and dreamed of a mother's love. 

In the morning I waked and found the village 
astir. It was near Florence. People were at their 
work. A sharpener of knives, a fruit seller, a ven- 
dor of macaroni — they were all in their places. I 
went to a merchant. His voice was loud. * To the 
mayor; he was strict and versed in the laws against 
vagrants. To a priest of the diocese; he berated me 
for leaving my native town. He did not care. 

There passed me, when the day was gone and I 
had not found a friend, a young girl with dark eyes 
and cheeks of olive graced with peach-bloom. Her 
clothing was little better than my own. She stopped, 
her head bowed upon her breast. I bowed mine to 
my bosom. Some artist might well paint this pic- 
ture. Both were standing and neither, apparently, 
aware of the other. I felt a love that warmed my 
whole being. 

Mio Caro Pevi! 

She walked away. I in the opposite direction. 
She went not to the cathedral, but to a poorer place 
of worship. I met her again in the little church. 
She was kneeling before the Virgin. I heard her 
pray. Her prayer made St. Francis what he is. I 
resolved that though I were broken on the rack, 
though friends cast me out and spat upon me, still 
would I be gentle. 

Then she arose. I said: "Dear girl, I crave per- 
mission to hold your slender fingers in my hand for 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 331 

one moment." One breast was uncovered. Phidias 
could never have emulated such beauty. Passion 
came to me. I yearned to kiss her in love, but . . . 
This was my hour of renunciation. The Passion-fires 
of my youth subsided. The maiden had left. She 
went out of the boundaries of my life. She took 
from me my sun. She was my purgatory. So gen- 
tleness became my religion. These are my last words 
to you. Be gentle. 

August 10, 1918 — John the Apostle 

"My earth children, my peers, for I am as lowly 
as you, remember that I was a humble Galilean fish- 
erman. I want to ask you who hear my words from 
the earth plane to remember that when the Master 
taught us to be gentle as a little child and to show 
great consideration for the pain of others, it was not 
merely a whisper, it was a cry wrung from the soul 
of Jesus. 

"May the Father lift you all closer to His bosom. 

"If the toil of day soils and bruises so that your 
garment is poor and rent, often this encases much 
at-one-ment with the Father's love." 

August 3, 1918 — Mary of Bethany 

"My earth sisters and brothers: In old Judean 
days, He passed me once on a road that led to a hill 
where often He went alone. I smiled. The smile 
was called forth from the buried strings of my soul 
by that tender compassionate face, all around which 
was a shining light. I smiled as a baby smiles at its 
mother, as a dying man smiles when he sees angels. 



332 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

"When He spoke, I heard a voice. I could hardly 
see His lips moving, but His loving truth came to me 
and made me His Mary. A woman never admires 
in a man weakness. She pities it. There never was 
on the earth a man hideous or terrific in his strength 
but some gentle woman loved him. If a man be 
capable of torrential wrath and the display of giant 
power, woman will cling to him. 

"I remember how Jesus stood before a howling 
mob with a voice of indignation that said : 'Let him 
who is without sin among you hurl the first stone.' 
Ajid again when He said, 'Ye generation of vipers 1' 

"He had also that other, gentle quality, apprecia- 
tion of the lily and the little child. These two sides 
of the Christ character are mountain sides up which 
humanity can climb to the Father of us all. 

"When they nailed Him to the cross, and His cry, 
*0 Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?' went ringing 
down the spheres, He looked on His mother, and a 
smile came into His eyes, and we saw a great light 
around Him. 

"The mothers of Palestine to-night, knowing that 
the temple will be restored, rejoice. The deserts will 
be bountiful again. I see my native land coming 
back to a greater glory than she had before her walls 
were thrown down." 

August 25, 1918 — The Mother of Jesus 

"I remember the moments before He was born, 
the pain of the hour of His birth. I remember when 
He lay in the manger. When He was five years old, 
I saw Him in the room of His boyhood holding con- 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 333 

verse with intelligences of higher spheres. I ob- 
served in Him a calmness most perfect. 

"Wonderful were those eyes of Him. Every 
mother remembers some part of her baby, — his 
golden hair, a dimpled smile, a wonderful way of for- 
getting pain when she kissed his nerves to tranquil- 
lity. I remember my baby's eyes. They seemed to 
me, like a breath of God, to hold in them all the wis- 
dom of time. So deep were they that no philosopher 
ever dreamed of the lace-like fringe of the glory in 
the eyes of my son. Eyes so deeply illuminated de- 
clare that every mother may have a son as divine as 
mine. 

"On the head of him who wrote the beautiful words 
read this evening* about me and my son and John, 
I lay a wreath of flowers redolent with the aroma 
of the pomegranate, the olive, the cedar, and all the 
lovely odours of my native Palestine." 

October 27, 1919— Milton 

The grandest theatre is the drama chamber of the 
imagination. In barren moments walk into that 
chamber. Get away from intellectual processes ; dis- 
miss the memory of books; imagine a critical audi- 
ence before you. Never forget that audience. For- 
get self. Demonstrate the facts of life. You are 
an actor. Make your prose dramatic. Your words 
must live and act. 

Begin with a striking epigram. Epigram is in- 
valuable in essay work. The intellect never wrote 

*A reading had been asked for by the Twentieth Plane {Three Com- 
rades of Jesus, pp. 66-7). 



334 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

an epigram. Put the whole idea of your essay into 
its first sentence. This is an arrester of the atten- 
tion. A psychological effect ensues. You have given 
the reader more than he can readily assimilate. He 
wants explanation. This attitude of the reader must 
be maintained throughout. Each sentence must sug- 
gest the need of reading the next. The second sen- 
tence explains somewhat. This is your exordium. 
There must be no anti-climax. 

Your last paragraph must be one of consummate 
splendour. The first line and the last paragraph are 
most important. The teaching comes in the body of 
the article and should lead up to great statements 
of fact. 

The whole human race loves human nature. Show 
always the humanity of your characters. 

The laws of finish are simple. One eats as much 
with his eyes as with his mouth. Make all your lines 
look well. This is particularly necessary in poetry. 
It should not be forgotten also in prose. 

Even prose should have its rhythm, its pause and 
its gesture. Words must be capable of distinct enun- 
ciation. Words that rhyme should not be in the same 
prose sentence. They should not be in two short 
consecutive sentences. 

Gesture in prose is necessary. It relieves the at- 
tention. The sentence should be an aside. It should 
not teach anything. The gesture is to arouse feel- 
ing, rest the intellect, challenge the reader to emotion. 

July 13, 1919— Paul 
"My brethren of the earth plane: I have come 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 335 

again through the great white light of love that shines 
around you, and while I do not, within that light, 
see the Master or hear His voice, yet I am affected 
by His teaching in so far as the Sermon on the Mount 
and many other things that He said have affected you 
on your journey of life — the same journey, mark 
you, that every soul that ever lived in the castle of 
a human body has taken or will take for asons and 
aeons of time. 

"There is not much that I can add to your knowl- 
edge of life, for, after all, with the exception of a 
few immortal utterances, one must experience each 
fact to know it, rather than learn the lesson through 
the words of another. But I address you in the spirit 
of the substance of things, that is, I mean, you are 
part, a branch of the tree of life, and I am a branch, 
a part of that tree; therefore, speak to me as if we 
were back again in old Judea, as if we were on the 
mountain, and I, having just come from a journey 
by the Master's side, after having removed my san- 
dals from my feet — washed by loving hands — were, 
with you, seated beneath the palm trees feeling re- 
freshed. Ask me what your heart would desire to 
know, not for the information I can supply, but for 
the direction in your own life experience that you 
need most." 

Were you acquitted after your first trial in Home ? 

"The facts are these: I was not acquitted at the 
first trial. I was remanded so that further investi- 
gation could be made. This was about the year 
sixty-four. Great national events ensued which I 
need not enumerate now. My execution was in sixty- 



336 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

six, but near sixty-seven. I died because of a ver- 
dict rendered against me at the second trial." 

How did you come to organize the Christian The- 
ology? 

"I was preeminently a practical man, and after 
my change of heart and disposition, and after the 
observation of the light, I saw that a religion of 
mysticism would, primarily, be of value only to the 
few. So I organized the churches into a system 
which, in turn, became, as you term it, a theology. 
I might be called one of the fathers of the Christian 
Theology, but I was only one of them." 

Can you throw any light on the feeding by the 
Master of the five thousand, and on another occasion 
of the four thousand? 

"The multitude were fed, not by a small quantity 
of food that became a larger quantity, but by a states- 
manlike arrangement which secured, in what was later 
termed a miraculous way, a sufficient quantity of food 
to feed the multitude. The mistake of all times is 
your literal interpretation of the Scriptures. The 
oriental mind thought poetically, drew similes, illus- 
trations, amid colour, beauty and the effect of words, 
etc. There was no miracle absolutely on that occa- 
sion. There was, though, a divine utterance by a 
master, but it would have been an utterly forgotten 
incident but for the glow, the eloquence, the import 
of His words. So with bated breath not so much your 
generation as immediately preceding generations said, 
'This is a miraculous thing.' 

"The raising of Lazarus from the dead was also 
in complete accord with natural law. What hap- 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 337 

pened in that incident was this: a peculiar form of 
paralysis took possession of a man named Lazarus. 
He was in a cataleptic ecstasy, but was pronounced 
dead by the doctors of that time, who, you must know, 
were very much in ignorance of true pathological con- 
ditions. He was buried, but not in one of those her- 
metically sealed caskets that you use, or by a proc- 
ess of burial such as the old Egyptians used in the 
embalming of their dead. The great psychic with 
clairvoyant power and vision came along and sensing 
rather than knowing or seeing his condition, applied 
natural methods to what was a natural incident, and 
there was a restoration not to a life, physically speak- 
ing, completely vanished, but to one that was held 
in suspense for the time. 

"It may seem strange that I should rather depre- 
cate the belief in miracles as understood in their lit- 
eral interpretation, but time has elapsed. There is, 
because of the cessation of earth plane hostilities, the 
light of an illuminating love all over terra flrma, and 
the time has come for the teachers of theology, the 
masters, the prophets, the seers of your age, to explain 
that the whole universe is controlled by natural, be- 
neficent law. 

"But you ask, 'Why did so many witnesses of these 
marvellous things report them as miracles V To them 
they were miracles. Even to most of you, if you ob- 
served the same phenomena, they would seem mirac- 
ulous. As to stilling the tempest, when a human be- 
ing breathes out he sends out an energy that extends 
for several miles in all directions around himself. If 
you knew the law you could breathe so that whenever 



338 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

a storm disturbs the atmosphere of your world, the 
storm would be lulled to sleep. This was exactly 
what happened when Jesus lulled to rest the storm." 

November 23, 1919 — Rabelais 

Friends of the earth plane: I am overjoyed — 
spilling over the brim. My joy is great thus to meet 
you all. I am a new denizen of this plane of light 
and vision, and they have asked me to speak briefly 
on any question you present to me about the power 
of wit and humour in literature. First of all, that 
I may meet my comrades of the earth plane with the 
grand tricolor floating over all assembled, let each 
one of us point to manhood like the gleaming of a 
star. I ask you to speak to me. 

What was your chief literary purpose when on the 
earth plane? 

Rabelais: I see by your question, Messieur, that 
you request from me that I speak a little of my per- 
sonal work. I will open the window and let some 
light into the chambers of your thought place. When 
I began to write, it was the age of atheism, cynicism, 
and doubt. There were writers like Voltaire who en- 
deavoured by their iconoclasm to smash the popular 
ideals. In the early days, particularly in the Middle 
Ages, no farce, no comedy, no drama was without 
its clown and the psychology of the jester; one 
dressed in motley, throwing here a half -idiotic jest, 
there a more serious thought; one who relieved a 
heavy situation by his presence and the ringing of 
timbrels and tinkling of brass bells. Psychologically, 
such a one did fill out comedies otherwise too heavy 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 880 

and solemn to be presented to the masses of the 
people. 

When the thinkers of my age, particularly the 
scholastics, the leaders of religion and all the litera- 
ture of the time, with rare exceptions, endeavoured 
to elevate and instruct the people with solemnity, I 
saw that they needed the clown, the jester, the mas- 
querader, to teach these very lessons, but to teach 
them in a different style and by a different method. 
This was to give to the people in the current coin 
of their own thought what they could understand. 
My wit, my humour, my so-called obscenity, in the 
literature that I penned was simply building up the 
clown, the masquerader, who would throw a bon mot 
here, a story or a joke there; then I could talk seri- 
ous lines of moving grace, teach them religion and 
philosophy. I am sure of the psychological impres- 
sion made at the time in that way. Comprenez vous? 

The great majority of writers on the earth plane 
put up a curtain here and a blind there and draw 
across this and that fact a screen. I never hid my 
meaning, hence I was accused. The clown, the jes- 
ter, the masquerader, is one who reveals the naked 
truth. In the new age dawning upon earth, write 
without screens, without blinds, without anything that 
would obscure your meaning. Part of the motive 
of all things is the sex-urge. Why obscure it ? Why 
build blinds before these facts? The earth plane is 
a sex plane, a plane of procreation. Nothing is ever 
done on your plane without the sex element being 
intimately concerned with that thing. You ask then: 
Do I advise licentiousness in literature. No, no, no! 



340 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

But I strongly desire honesty in the purpose of writ- 
ing anything. The most sacred thing of all requires 
no reticence, 

March 8, 1920 — Shakespeare 

My brothers, bound by the life you live, be free 
and float as do the tides; swing with the movement 
of worlds. Worry not nor fret nor be in haste. A 
flower is beautiful because it does not care, and love 
is strong only because she dares and dares again, and 
makes her own conventions, though the whole world 
asks her to explain. Enter the million places that 
daily you walk by and never discover, — the life of a 
newfound friend, the contemplation of a star, the 
method by which to control your voice so that your 
words are music. 

All the world is craving for discovery. Be a race 
of discoverers. You who think you know what your 
loved one has been thinking through all the years, 
decide for the moment that you do not, then look 
and seek again, and you will discover in your loved 
one another person more worthy to be loved, and this 
goes on forever. 

The greatest truth of all to learn is how nature 
moves. Then, both in thought and carriage, you 
learn to move with the poise of a flying bird, the drift 
of the streams, the swaying of flowers in the breezes, 
the tender movement of music that kisses your being 
Kith invisible touch. 

Learn to unlock and unbar all the doors of re- 
straint, to toss away all masks, to be agile, mobile, 
resilient in all you say and are. Seasons are 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 341 

moods. Lives should be as sensitive to the moods of 
nature as a clear mirror that reflects the image of a 
face. 

The legislators of the earth will find means by 
which to emancipate the people politically. Great 
souls in a higher way will discover how to emancipate 
the mind. Release the body from the chains of re- 
straint, then you will be a free people in a free world. 
Be like a flower, beautiful because you are free from 
care. 

August 1, 1918 — Shelley 

My comrades beneath the sun: I would be one 
who could become a flower kissed by immortal per- 
fume, or a tree, or sparkling waves, or sheens of 
damask, or pale gold beneath the splendours of the 
moon. 

The whole universe is responsible for you. To live 
in harmony with law makes one happy. Get away 
from self. Think of the other self. Live the life 
beautiful. Observe the quiet hour in the morning. 
Close the door, but open wide the window. 

You had recently a son of the Orient with you. 
You saw in his eyes the vision of the highest planes. 
One who masters himself lives the greatest life. Be 
calm. Speak in a low voice. Listen with an open 
ear. Live in spacious surroundings. Think high. 
Breathe deeply. Pray often. 

When you meet a man or a woman, look into their 
eyes; you will see beauty there beyond that of the 
most beautiful poem. 

Human nature is not fundamentally bad. 



342 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

It is midnight on the astral planes. R. L. S. went 
by just now, saying, "Come to rest." 

The first person you meet on the morrow, give him 
a beautiful thought-gift. We on this plane will try 
to give it effect. 

I am dreaming — for you. 

December 8, 1918 — Spinoza 

Colour may be said to be that phase of energy 
which creates mood in the consciousness, rather than 
a concrete idea. It is akin to music and art which 
also deliver their teaching through the creation of 
mood rather than by the employment of an effect 
upon your intellectual consciousness. It is found on 
every plane. 

It will be necessary to distinguish between colour 
vibrations and other forms of frequency. Colour re- 
sembles other forms of vibration in the sending, but 
differs from every other at the point of contact rather 
than in its intrinsic nature. There are colour-recep- 
tive regions in the consciousness of every soul. These 
regions respond to colour vibrations only. All other 
forms of pulsation from surfaces that send out a 
colour stimulus can, to some extent, affect any region 
of the mind. Colour cannot affect in a distinctly 
colourful way any other parts of consciousness but 
those which harmonize with the vibrations of colour. 
It is individualistic, in the sense that it can impress 
only those parts of consciousness which correspond 
with the colour vibrations sent out to teach the various 
hues of nature. 

The appeal of colour is more emotional than in- 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 343 

tellectual. Emotion and mood are closely allied. 
Mood is that keynote of decision which regulates the 
speed of thought. Emotion may be said to be the 
decision arrived at after thought has concluded what 
object it has to attain. Mood might be said to be a 
lesser phase of emotion. . . . 

Music always contains colour; that is, while music 
is a definite and distinctive form of vibration in itself, 
it cannot be music without an intermixture of some 
of the vibrations of colour-substance. As much as 
to say that the soul cannot function independently of 
a body either physical or astral. Colour is the body 
in which music lives. 

Of course, the first obvious question that arises is: 
"If music contains the rate of vibration that is colour, 
why does not the physical eye tell the consciousness 
of the soul that colour is seen when music is heard?" 

You see only a limited portion of any colour. 
Some forms of music do not convey any visual sense. 
They set up in the consciousness only a chaotic con- 
dition, an intermingling of emotions, moods and 
thoughts unmatured. Music is a universal language. 
More than any other art, it has the power to make 
one exalted soul of all the souls of the universe. 
Many compositions are universal in scope and ap- 
peal. 

Music was, first of all, a crude form of expression. 
As human thought ascended, it became more com- 
plex. A more refined form of musical expression 
will gradually reveal itself, and a form of music 
almost new will come into use. The polyphonic art, 
striking in appeal, original in teaching, exact in ratio, 



SU BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

will develop into a music akin to the musical speaking 
voice, a voice or language that all the human race 
can understand. I might almost go as far as to say 
that music in a measure will supplant language and 
be used to teach certain great truths, especially reli- 
gious truths. 

Soul expression is the basis of all progress. With- 
out some point where the expression is definite, prog- 
ress would be impossible. The educated man finds 
that only through intense concentration can he ad- 
vance. The uneducated cannot endure the concen- 
tration and gives up the quest. The educated per- 
son will struggle through to the point where condi- 
tions harden to mathematical exactitude, while the un- 
educated will give up with hardly a struggle. 

Red has the power to make one think of warmth. 
Blue is an elevating and solacing colour. Green is 
the colour of attention. Green and blue are both 
soul colours; they affect the ego, the consciousness, 
the soul. Purple may be described as the colour that 
soars. It elevates the soul and is a distinctive soul 
colour. It is one of the colours of religion. It is 
the colour of inspiration, and makes the soul respon- 
sive. Violet has nearly the same effect, but not with 
the same intensity as purple. 

White is the colour of the saints. The reason is 
that in white all known forms of colour-vibration have 
learned to be brothers and sisters. All the colours 
have here forgotten their prejudices and harmonized 
with a beautiful grace. White will always be, on 
every plane, throughout all time, the colour that God 
dresses the best thought in. 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 345 
1920 — Swederiborg 

My heart tenderly thrills to a request vibration mu- 
sically inviting a message from the soul of Immanuel 
Swedenborg, and my message will be a prayer to 
God and the angels for the people who dwell in all 
the worlds. 

Great omnipotent Spirit of all Being, cause the 
physical clouds of darkness to drop from obscured 
eyes so that they may see that the physical world is 
the plane of effect, delusion, and that heaven is the 
world of causality, the Divine back of the projection 
of Himself in lesser form, establishing a physical 
plane of life where tears are shed, men suffer, and 
gloom ofttimes settles on the earth. 

May the purpose of the mystery of life be made 
clear, so that men and women may know that the law 
of correspondence relates your deepest woe with your 
greatest joy. There is no joy without grief, or love 
without a lover. Where pure happiness is the sole 
atmosphere, there the monotony is the most intense. 
There must always be a lower and a higher, to every 
angle, two sides. A circle cannot be a square. So 
it is my prayer that through the Divine, the people 
of earth may understand the inequalities, the disap- 
pointments, the mysteries, the pain of existence to 
be necessary concomitants of the reverse virtues, the 
opportunities which are always the other phase, the 
larger side and most enduring of those experiences 
which inspire sighs in man and tears from angels. 

Only those who love are happy. There is in the 
universe, for every soul, a correspondent lover, one 



346 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lover created from infinitude by the Divine to cor- 
respond to every lover as the midnight stars corre- 
spond to the purpose of the heavens. This law, O 
Father of Glory, have I learned to be true of every 
soul regardless of the misshapen body, the twisted 
soul and the life of sin; but the very truth of all this 
teaching is a warning bell whose tones should ring 
a mighty sound through the caverns of access to all 
those in physical life, telling them that through sin, 
which is selfishness — a reverting back to an animal 
type, your lover is caused to wander forlorn through 
many ages waiting for you. The great hell is delay. 
To my followers of the earth plane I am inspired 
to say that the physical plane is now redeemed. 
Through the fire of the great war it has become puri- 
fied. The purging of death has left a new-born gen- 
eration of great souls who find the earth to be now 
the great garden of Eden where both the beauty and 
the fragrance of flowers and all that is valued in art, 
literature, religion and science has become the servant 
of man, lovingly and unceasingly toiling to reveal 
to him the universe as man and love and God. 

November 22, 1919 — Tasso 

Do not depend too much on libraries. Some of 
their shelves are garbage heaps. 

Turn consciousness away from all petty things. 

Magniloquence is ineffective. 

The most stupendous thought is often uttered in 
the simplest words. 

Gentleness is thrilling. Nothing is more eloquent 
than a tear-drop. 



EPISODES OF THE SUBLIME 347 

The important note must be penetrating and soul- 
gripping. 

Strike the key in the first line. Sound the ominous 
note. Tune up the consciousness. 

Literature, not the litterateur, is the architect. The 
theme will determine its own form. Every subject 
has its own form and temperament. 

Great writing is psychic. 



THE JOY OF GRIEF 

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Joy is the sunshine of love reflected from the soul 
of happiness. Joy is beauty — music. It is the great 
power of earned leisure, when the toil of life rests 
awhile by the side of a river in the shadow of trees, 
and the flower-embroidered earth becomes the play- 
field where God and man meet and are happy. Joy 
is that almost perfect sanity which a normal relation 
with the Divine brings to an individual. True joy 
is sinless pleasure, the rapt delight an artist has in 
his work. Spiritual joy is the contemplation of a 
burning truth, with a wide open comprehensive eye. 
The joy of strength of character is the only mould 
in which heroism is cast, and the courageous are the 
character-warriors of the university of earth. Cow- 
ards never meet the spirit of joy. Joy is met only 
when the soul, as true as truth, tears affectation into 
shreds. Then is happiness, abandon, freedom and 
revelry in the unconfined joy of God's delight. 

In examining the people of the earth plane, think- 
ers on the astral planes often refer to the real eleva- 
tion and development physical beings have attained. 
In reading the earth-plane-life examination papers, 
higher plane standards estimate material wealth, no 
matter how successfully obtained, personal develop- 
ment at the expense of others, the gifts of genius that 

848 



THE JOY OF GRIEF 349 

either heredity or environment have given, and have 
but one criterion by which to recognize the earth- 
plane individual's development. They take into con- 
sideration three things : 

How has this individual used any power of control 
over another? 

Has this soul so lived that his life meant joy to 
others ? 

Has he himself known what joy is? 

I know this heaven plane criterion of character esti- 
mation sounds like a trite expression of axiomatic 
platitudes. "They are so simple/' say you, "and so 
apparent." But are they? The earth plane war, if 
it has taught anything, teaches that mankind has 
lived so far from the teachings of Jesus that in their 
ignorance they have had false gods, many of them. 
It is well nigh time that the prodigal human race 
returned home to simpler standards and deeper 

truths. 

The purpose of this chapter is to tell you in de- 
tail the value of real grief, and how joy enables one 
to know the beneficent power of grief when suffering 
becomes an entrance door to the cosmic life. Before 
you can find the door with me, you must know what 
false joy is and what is real; you must know what 
false grief is and what is genuine. False joy is, first 
of all, that pleasure that panders to the physical 
senses when such appetites are the chief end. False 
joy is that which believes that life is merely for the 
satiation of intellectual ambition. False joy is non- 
artistic existence. I do not care how regal your 
dress, how royal your abode, how vast your wealth. 



350 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

If you have learned to extract merely a physical and 
intellectual pleasure from life, then yours is a false 
joy, and the falsity of it is in the fact that you are 
walking on a thin crust of a shallow sense which, ere 
you expect it, crushes beneath your feet, and the con- 
cussion of reality drives you into a thought cell where, 
either on the earth plane or on the next life plane, 
you review your life and learn how false was your 
joy. My brother, do not think me unsympathetic. 
Always the best sympathy is the truth. 

The first great thought you will establish on assum- 
ing relationship in your next plane life will be an 
estimate of your self. You will realize that most of 
your grief on the earth plane was selfish. I have 
spoken to thousands about this, and all concur in the 
conclusion that most grief is self-willed pain, the satia- 
tion of a false desire, the ignorance of suffering, its 
power and its intention. 

False grief is usually a form of self-pity, and this 
is one of the sins on the earth plane that Jesus told 
you could not be expiated in the physical world. It 
is a matter of relation. False grief usually has its 
beginning in a comparison of one's position on the 
earth with the station of another. False grief, then, 
becomes envy, jealousy, suspicion, and dissatisfaction 
with life, and these are the foulest of sins. I do not 
say, my brother, that there is no genuine grief. I am 
but endeavouring to stimulate your prevision with 
such illumination that your foreknowledge will pre- 
vent you from entering the scaled-snake nation where 
false grief is a poisonously vitiated atmosphere that 
kills. 



THE JOY OF GRIEF 351 

We turn our faces to a more lovely sun. Together 
we will learn the use and power of genuine grief. 
For it has a use which is the grace of soul power, and 
it is our bounden duty to know one more law of love. 
Genuine grief is unselfish pain that comes through 
sorrow. It is a test of strength in an hour when, 
because reason is keener, your call upon yourself is 
greater, and so your life is enlarged. Grief is not 
fear, but knowledge in the light. Genuine grief is 
the pardonable despair that the worthy feel when 
their souls drip blood at the contemplation of the 
false grief of others. 

Genuine grief is sometimes a process of forced 
growth. You have been luxuriant and lackadaisical 
long enough. There has been wonderful character- 
power, but without leaven. Then grief becomes the 
leaven, and in the tropical heat of a swifter growth 
you save much time in your journey through the 
mists of earth to the land of light. All of you on 
occasion have met some sublime character and have 
said: "This one has suffered." 

My work would be in vain unless I endeavoured 
to show how to use grief produced by bereavement 
as a means of seeing the illusion of imagined be- 
reavement, and through communion to meet the loved 
one who never was departed. If you have read psy- 
chic literature with communications from the sur- 
rounding worlds, you will know that every imagined 
departed loved one has referred to this law: Your 
grief holds me away; your joy draws me near. That 
is the law. Grief, even when genuine, if it becomes 
physical suffering, renders you a positive physical 



352 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

being, non-passive, discontented, nervously dis- 
traught, and almost armour-proof to inspiration. 
How divine a truth in the idea that time heals all 
wounds. And it does. Why? Because in time your 
grief loses, at least, its physical expression. Your 
mind is no more contracted. You forget yourself 
into touch with the ever-seeking, imagined departed 
loved one, and for a second you stand startled by 
the flood of joy that sweeps like music through your 
life. 

You agree with me that many false things have 
been thought to be wisdom and taught with disaster 
to the students of the university of life. You have 
been taught for centuries how to find a form of joy. 
But little you recked how to meet and know and use 
the sublime power of grief. When the Master said, 
"I came not to bring peace but a sword," He did 
not mean that He came to bring the combat of phys- 
ical blood-spilling. He meant to teach the power 
of grief, and He lived His teaching so artistically, 
religiously, genius-like that they have called Him ever 
since "A man of Grief." He was, but He was no 
harbinger and expositor of false grief. He taught 
you how to use grief so all-godlike that even yet the 
earth plane has not recovered sufficient equilibrium 
to know the significance of His teaching. How did 
He use grief? He employed grief in the Garden of 
Gethsemane, on the mountain side, at the table of 
the last supper, in the never-recorded drama — that 
epical episode when he whispered, "Mary, good-bye!" 
and on the cross, when he cried aloud: "Father, why 
hast Thou forsaken me?" In these instances He em- 



THE JOY OF GRIEF 353 

ployed grief as a furnace burns the debris from gold. 
My brother, so should you. 

Call this not the homiletic method. It is but Sam- 
uel Taylor Coleridge using his own and other expe- 
rience of grief to meet your grief with joy. And 
thus we two, as brothers, return home again to our 
Father who is waiting at the door of joy and grief 
to welcome us. 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO THE HOME 

OF JESUS 

Elbert Hubbard 

Because of the glamour thrown around the life of 
the man called Jesus by time, literature and religion, 
it is difficult, when the mind reverts to the age in 
which He lived, to see Him as a normal man. It is 
the object of this little essay to reveal Jesus as a 
man shorn of all the wrappages with which the cen- 
turies have clothed one of the simplest, purest, gen- 
tlest natures of all time. 

A little journey to the home of Jesus is as easy 
of accomplishment as is the growth of the flowers of 
the field. Jesus lives in our imagination; He dwells 
in our heart; He is comprehended by our soul. He 
loves us, understands and permeates our age so thor- 
oughly that He is a part of us. This is why He is 
the most misunderstood of all men. In His own 
day the common people heard Him gladly, for He 
came as one speaking with authority, which is to say, 
He was so simple in His teaching that the ignorant 
could understand Him and the learned could not dis- 
pute Him. 

The home of Jesus is as immortal as the man. It 
is in the souls of all who ever heard of Him. Who- 
ever, in any age, has been touched by the thought 

354 



A LITTLE JOURNEY 355 

of Jesus has added his consciousness as another room 
in the ever enlarging home of Jesus. So this mas- 
ter of inspiration dwells within our souls and we will 
journey to him in an expedition of discovery, the 
object of which is to determine what manner of man 
this is. 

The great are always the most approachable. He 
who is hard to approach is mediocre. He does not 
understand that mountains, oceans, skies, are as hos- 
pitable to an ignoramus as they are to a philosopher. 
These thoughts accompany us as we journey to the 
home of Jesus. 

Life pulls to either side the silver, silken curtains 
at the portal; we enter. First of all, we are aware 
of a calmness, a serenity, a quietude, in this man 
and around Him which makes us feel at ease in His 
presence. We behold one in height a little above 
middle stature. We see the arms, breast and body 
of a man proportioned with that beauty which em- 
anates only from the Divine. His hair falls in curls 
from a head, massive and beautiful in its curves as 
befits a man-god. The forehead is high and broad. 
But those eyes! Those eyes! Did a poet ever live 
who could describe the beauty of a star? Much less 
can my language convey even a superficial indica- 
tion of the beautiful gold colour which burned within 
those luminous orbs, those worlds of fire, those two 
chambers of expression and observation through 
which the soul of Jesus looked upon mankind. 

We are not dismayed by the beauty or uniqueness 
of this great soul. We never felt more comfortable 
in our lives. This is true of the sacredly great. It 



856 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

is infinitely so of Jesus. He had the power while 
you were in His presence of making you feel at one 
with Himself. That is why nineteen hundred years 
have built to Him in history the sublimest monu- 
ment ever reared as a tribute to a great soul. I could 
refer to shrines, churches, marble monuments, 
founded and erected, as their authors thought, for 
Jesus' sake, but these will be some day but scattered 
dust ; only the literature of the life of Jesus will live. 

So we are in His presence. Were you ever in the 
presence of a great man? What ensues? Your soul 
is a question mark; his soul is the answer. You 
wonder who will speak first; what will be said. He 
answers: "Friend, have you journeyed far? Are 
you hungry — thirsty?" These questions being an- 
swered, the great man always discusses some event 
not connected with either of you. You are aware 
in the presence of Jesus that He is just such a man. 
His voice is such as you heard your mother use when 
you were in pain and she was restoring you to ease 
again. All whom I have met who ever spoke to 
Jesus say that the calmness, naturalness, real broth- 
erhood of this man and God captivated them so much 
that they felt Godlike themselves. In the presence 
of Jesus we are immediately at home with one who 
had this unique quality, that He would never let any- 
one depart from His presence without having im- 
parted some lesson which would restore their soul. 

Jesus' method of meeting His brother, even as we 
meet Him now for the first time, was dependent on 
making you feel comfortable, natural and at home. 
Then, when you did not expect it, He opened wide 



A LITTLE JOURNEY 357 

His eyes, like lightning penetrated your being and 
said: "Brother, there is an incompleteness in you." 
And still you are at ease, happy and comfortable 
in the presence of the most intense character of all 
time. You unburden yourself. You speak of your 
sin. Always, this anomaly is manifested. Jesus is 
never impressed by the sin of which you accuse your- 
self. He discovers for you, through you, a more 
vital one. You agree. You bend low. You kiss the 
hem of His garment. You stand erect, throw back 
your head, breathe deeply, then you look Jesus, the 
Man, Master, God, in the face ; you see the Universe 
in His eyes; you feel and hear the music of His 
smile. You leave His abode. The silver, silken cur- 
tains close, and you are born again. 

It is night now as you walk down the road that 
leads to your home, and you know that the stars 
glistening in the heavens are happy. That little cot- 
tage just passed, its windows lighted by a lamp, is 
a place of love. There father, mother, children, are. 
Nothing on earth is more beautiful than that. You 
hear birds singing, for all night you have wandered, 
thinking, thinking, and the dawn of another day has 
come. You waken from your cosmic reverie and go 
home, a man! 



358 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

The following paragraph was received from 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, August fifteenth, nineteen 
twenty. 

"We have been the media through which have 
passed from the Twentieth Plane several messages 
of a brief nature, and three in a more extensive form, 
from the Man of Galilee — Jesus. They could not 
be published in this volume because of their distinc- 
tive character, but are a necessary portion of the 
Twentieth Plane Revelation, which we are assured 
will be published without delay in a separate volume." 

[A. D. W.] 



COMMENTS 

The Reporter 

This chapter presents the reporter's convictions 
concerning the Revelation. It is not a volume of 
psychical research. Its main purpose is not one of 
investigation. It does not claim to prove the state- 
ments it contains. It invites the reader to prove them 
by living them. It is not "Spiritualism." That 
movement must clear itself of many excrescences which 
have discredited it. It was so of Christianity. It is 
so of every significant movement. Every important 
system of thought is hampered for a time by self- 
interest, but the importance of the teaching is proven 
when it succeeds in surviving these objectionable 
features. 

Birth Through Death is a revelation given to the 
earth plane because of the universal need of instruc- 
tion from heaven, desired and prayed for by many 
with earnest faith and vision. It is heaven's response 
to earth's prayer, to assuage the pain and sorrow, to 
abolish the injustice and cruelty of this earth-world, 
and to establish on new foundations of love and 
brotherhood, light and equity, a civilization emerging 
from the best in economics and ethics. 

It is intended to indicate the way, not to a new 
religion so much as to a purer conception of the 
religion which Christ the man lived and taught along 

359 



360 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lines embodying, as that religion attempted to do, 
the highest elements of all previous religions, espe- 
cially that of the Hebrews. It inculcates a religion 
in which spiritual communion with God and the 
heaven planes and a brotherly relation with all men 
are central and paramount. Such a religion will take 
little interest in those intellectual credos so much 
stressed in the "Christianity" of the past. 

The Revelation enjoins a more general practice 
of those laws of health and life which our lack of in- 
formation has so long led us to ignore. It indicates 
how we may at all times receive inspiration from the 
highest sources, not necessarily in verbal communi- 
cation, but by thoughtful meditation in quiet faith 
and prayer, by regarding ourselves as children of 
the Divine, as voices to speak His word of helpful- 
ness, channels through which His power may flow, 
as unobtrusive light-bearers to others whom we may 
be able properly and naturally to illuminate, and by 
keeping in view the unity of our life with the one 
universal Life of God, and with all who live in Him. 

It is a deep, far call for a universal return to the 
observance of that meditation which is "twilight 
prayer," the restoration of leisured meditation as a 
battlement against materialism. This practice in the 
"poem hour" will help to keep the soul in commu- 
nion with the heaven planes. 

Despite the attacks of those who misunderstand, 
multitudes of readers in various lands will order their 
lives in harmony with the teachings of this Revela- 
tion. They will read and reread and deeply con- 
sider this Revelation, and it will give them clear guid- 



COMMENTS 361 

ance and lead them by paths of prayer into lives of 
holiness (wholesomeness), harmony and power. 

Most readers — probably all — will find passages 
which they cannot understand. A revelation is 
never entirely obvious. There will appear to be dis- 
crepancies, but these too will dissolve into light. 
Jesus himself set aside Levitical Scriptures* felt to 
be necessary in the earlier days, but now long repu- 
diated. 

Those who would be glad to know positively that 
the messages are authentic are referred especially to 
the chapter entitled Facts in Evidence. Those who 
wish to be healthy and beautiful should read often 
the chapters Sleep: Its Power and Uses, and Sap- 
pho's great chapter Beauty of Body Through Soul. 
To those who wish to develop a strong, pure and 
radiant character, we recommend a daily reading of 
passages selected by their own choice for this pur- 
pose, but read anything in this Revelation and you 
will be instructed and inspired. 

The evidence of authenticity will be set aside by 
some readers as being probably explained by one 
theory or another. The subconscious mind, the telep- 
athy theory, the hypnotic theory, and in the case of 
the Message star, the supposition that we were all 
hypnotized. Everything can be explained to the sat- 
isfaction of the mind that feels that everything must 
be explained. Great minds have spent many years 
investigating these matters. All who have spent a 
reasonably adequate period in the work have con- 
cluded that spirit communication is a fact. Is it not 
best that we should let our intuitions guide us along 



362 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

lines where investigators of acknowledged competence 
would lead? The fact is, the average man believes in 
Spirit Communication. 

The reader of this Revelation is not asked by the 
communicants to be a mystic or a seer, and is dis- 
tinctly warned not to be a spiritualist, except in the 
most idealistic sense. All that the Revelation de- 
mands of him is that he shall conform to the natural 
greatness of his own soul. By being natural he most 
effectively relates himself with those divine sources 
of energy which are available to all. Faith, passivity 
and happiness on the part of any individual receive 
as an instant response a flow of noble inspiration. 

There are few moments in the life of any soul when 
it is not inspired. Inspiration may be either a crea- 
tion or a new form of matured inspiration, and it 
comes either from the consciousness of the universe 
directly or from the consciousness of the universe as 
contained in an individual soul. It may be some of 
each of these. It may be some of each to which your 
own contribution brings new form and worth. 

These facts, which are sufficiently axiomatic not 
to require argumentation, are set forth here to em- 
phasize w T hat William James states in this Revelation, 
that we are physical beings, in a psychic world, using 
psychic faculties, and living at the most psychic pe- 
riod in history. The hard-headed, metallically-prag- 
matic business man is often psychic when intensely 
reviling all psychic practices. Be sure the thing you 
deride is not mocking you with a silent smile, by 
means of the life and power you give it with your 
skepticism. 



COMMENTS 363 

There is good in all religions. There is, however, 
in most of the religious systems in present vogue, a 
submission to economic conditions forced by expedi- 
ency. What agency could possibly spiritualize pres- 
ent systems except by direct revelation such as these 
pages enunciate? This was the experience of Moses. 
It was the experience of Jesus. Now it passes from 
one to another till it becomes the experience of an 
age. 

How true are the words of Disraeli as spoken to 
us a few days ago through the psychic consciousness 
of our Instrument: "The most glaring weakness of 
the present religious system is its exhaustion. The 
reader knows, for it is apparent to all, that in its 
effort to feed the mind of the public, the church has 
expended its force. Orthodox sermons are obsolete. 
Many in the endeavour to be both modern and ortho- 
dox, manifest a reticence, meekness and lack of can- 
dour which cannot be defended. The weakness of 
earth plane religions to-day is that they are in a 
defensive attitude. Religion should never be de- 
fended; it should be respected. The militancy of 
truth has subsided amid the mechanism of an edifice 
constructed to support a thousand inventions. Reli- 
gion is the simple word of God stated in a simple 
way so as to be understood by the multitude." 

There are those who understand the attitude of the 
reporter of this Revelation, and who know that he 
will never do, as the Twentieth Plane will never 
teach, one thing of an unsympathetic nature towards 
any sincere religion. He is free from theological re- 
straint that he may be a soldier of the common good. 



364 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

It must be evident that the masses of the people 
are not antagonistic to this attitude and that a Rev- 
elation like Birth Through Death is the reaching of 
a point of need in the evolution of human thought. 
One evidence of this is the avidity with which a cer- 
tain school of literature is read: Volumes such as 
"By an Unknown Disciple" Buick White's great 
work, "The Call of the Carpenter/' Swedenborg's 
"Heaven and Hell" and kindred works, besides the 
great mass of psychic literature such as "The Undis- 
covered Country" "Letters of a Living Dead Man" 
"Thy Son Liveth" "Raymond" "The Seven Pur- 
poses" "Contact with Other Worlds" and many 
others. 

To me it is heresy to say that our heavenly Father 
spoke more clearly to men two thousand years ago 
than he speaks to us to-day. "But," you say, "that 
was an era of revelation." I answer: "So is this." 
A new age is simply a new spiritual dawn, and this 
is the spiritual dawning of a new age. Millions are 
now asking, "What has become of our loved ones?" 
The God and Father of Love will answer them. Who 
dares to say the All-Father has forbidden us to com- 
mune despite the circumstance of death with those 
whom we most love? 

The eternal things are not limited to any age. 
More prophets are living to-day than in the time of 
Isaiah. God is not dumb because the canon of He- 
brew Scripture is closed. He keeps a progressive 
canon and a perennial tryst in the hearts of his chil- 
dren of light and vision. 



COMMENTS 365 

The spirit world knows that the whole mass of 
humanity is on the threshold of a new and more 
spiritual age in which communication with higher 
planes of being will be as natural as it is for a child 
to nurse at its mother's breast. True spiritual com- 
munication is the endeavour to reach the divine 
through the individuality of those we love in this or 
any other world. No one soul ever thought of an- 
other with love, but those souls came into some de- 
gree of communion, and both came closer to God 
and received divine energy through each other from 
Him, and this is true whatever supposed barrier may 
intervene of time or space or death. 

Nothing that is good to live ever died, but the 
heart of humanity wants to know in terms of its own 
times God's answer to the question: "Where are our 
loved ones?" The answer of two thousand years ago 
no longer satisfies the masses. They ask: "If God 
told the Jews two thousand years ago, why does He 
not tell us?" The heart has a right to an answer 
to that question. The answer is: "He does. You 
shall never be separated from the one you truly love." 

The reporter of this Revelation is conscious that 
the experience of a soul, when expressed, is of value 
to another soul. He knows that the statement of 
a deep religious conviction is, if possible, of greater 
value still. Nevertheless, he wishes to say that it has 
been his purpose in writing these comments, while 
stating his own convictions and the intention and 
teaching of the Twentieth Plane, to make it clear 
that the soul grows only when its thought-life is one 



366 BIRTH THROUGH DEATH 

of real freedom, and when from every experience it 
draws those valid conclusions which alone mean prog- 
ress for mankind. 

In closing this volume of inspired revelation, the 
work is laid lovingly upon the altar of humanity, 
with a prayer in the name of the Father's love for 
all His children, that no brother or sister of the race, 
our Father's human family, may fail of some heav- 
enly influence in this new age when His fuller word 
is spoken in benediction to the earth. May you and 
I, dear reader, in moments of anguish, in hours of 
darkness, find the light that reveals a loving God in 
every experience. May the Eternal Love help us all 
to realize the ideal of such a communion. 



INDEX 



,w 



INDEX 



Abdul Baha (The elder), 255. 

Acid Test, the, 36. 

Air, 224; of the astral world, 228; 

foundational, 185. 
Alertness, 55. 
Ambition, 294. 
Anaesthetic, 86, 232. 
Anger, a poison, 59. 
Argon, 228 et seq. 
Arnold, Matthew, 39, 245. 
Art, 55, 60. 
Arthur, 133 et seq. 
Astral cord, 186. 
Athens, 145. 

Atonement for misspent life, 19. 
Attitudes of life, 77, 80, 90. 
Aura, 152 et seq. 
Authenticity, 361. 
Avic, 217, 228 et seq., 260. 

B 

Bach, Sebastian, 193 et seq. 
Basic substance, one universal, 238. 
Beauty, 53 et seq., 74, 229. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 247. 
Belgium, 289. 
Besant, Annie, 187. 
Birds, 122. 
Birth Through Death, a drama, 13; 

a revelation, 14. 
Blake, William, 263. 
Blood (Flood), 34. 
Breathing, 54; how to breathe, 54; 

where to breathe deeply, 54; for 

achievement, 261. 



Brock, Edith, 1. 
Browning, E. B., 161. 
Bryant, W. C, 34. 
Bunyan, 253. 
Burke, Edmund, 257. 



Canoe, the phantom, 127. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 253. 

Carnegie, Andrew, 255. 

Castro, Signor da, 41. 

Channing, Wm. E., 34. 

Chemistry, 237. 

Children's Party, 119 et seq. 

Christian Science, 60. 

Christmas Tree, 133. 

Circle, half, 116. 

Citizenship, principles of, 167. 

Coleridge, Hartley, 118, 124. 

Coleridge, Samuel T., 19, 23, 26, 37, 

85 et seq., 92, 97, 182, 240, 243, 

245, 251. 
Colours, 270, 343 et seq., their 

meanings, 154; relation of music 

to, 202 and 203. 
Columbus, 82. 

Commercialism, dangers of, 93. 
Communication, difficulties of 

psychic, 75; when permissible, 

92. 
Communion with other planes, 78, 

366. 
Compassion, 80. 
Conditions under which Revelation 

was received, 1. 
Confucius, 254. 



369 



870 



INDEX 



Consciousness, 172, 326, 350; cessa- 
tion of, 12; blending of, 12; 
cosmic, 85 et seq.; eternal, 48, 
50; finite, 48; definition of, 179; 
intellectual phase of, 85; adjust- 
ment to universal, 175. 

Constantine, 158. 

Copernicus, 82. 

Corday, Charlotte, 253. 

Correspondence, 231, 373. 

Criticism, literary, 41. 

Crookes, Wm., 217, 223 et seq. 

Curative power within, 271. 

Custer, General, 34. 

Czolgosz, 256. 



D 



Darkness, 97. 

Death, 282; meaning of, 12, 76. 

Desire, power of, 115. 

Dickens, Charles, 246. 

Dimpity Jumbo, 124. 

Disease, cure of, 57 et seq.; use of 

physical agencies in, 59, 80; 

effects of music in, 204. 
Disraeli, 96, 102, 164, 253. 
Dogs, 123. 
Drama, 7. 
Drummond, Henry, 138. 



E 



Earth plane, 365; plane of de- 
lusion, 373. 

Eddy, Mary Baker, 60. 

Education, 168. 

Eight principles, 49. 

Eleanor, 133 et seq. 

Electricity, 233 et seq. 

Electronic energy, 235; release of, 
236. 



Emanations, 235. 

Emerson, 35, 75, 99, 100, 101, 251. 
Energy, 228; atomic, 240; conser- 
vation of, 219. 
Epictetus, 250. 
Epigrams, 273 et seq. 
Eva, 121. 

Evidence, 44 ; facts in, 25 et seq. 
Experience, 147. 

F 

Facts in evidence, 25 et seq. 

Faraday, Michael, 81. 

Fear, a poison, 59; how to dispel, 

77. 
Fichte, 146. 

Fidlar, Dr. Edward, 218. 
Florence, 63, 65. 
Flowers, 121. 
Fra Domenico, 69, 96. 
Franchise, standards for, 167. 
Fra Silvestro, 69, 92. 
Friends, 79; friendship, 113. 

G 

Galileo, 43, 222. 

Genius, 106, 107, 113, 147, 151. 

Gentleness, 330, 347. 

Gesture, in literature, 360. 

Gifts, how to receive, 132. 

God, 89; conception of, 97; a 

Mother, 113; presence of, 126; 

comprehension of, 143. 
Goethe, 81, 146. 
Golden light, 26. 
Good Nature, 130. 
Government, 99, 156. 
Gravitation, 229 et seq. 
Greece, 61, 157, 289. 
Grief, see Sorrow. 
Grierson, Francis, 25. 
Growing old, 78, 238. 



INDEX 



371 



H 

Hamilton, Alexander, 256. 
Hamilton, Sir Wm, 87. 
Hartmann, 87. 
Heakes, Lieut. Vernon, 42. 
Healing, 57, 77; gift of, 259 et 

seq. 
Health, effects on, of noise, 56; 

music, 56; breathing, 54; love, 

55; art, 61. 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 187, 247. 
Heart of minor importance, 57. 
Helen, 128, 129. 
Heroism, stifled, 115. 
Hill, George A., 40. 
History, 142. 
Hope, 211. 
Horses, 123. 

Hubbard, Elbert, 245, 272, 355. 
Hudson, 87. 
Hugo, Victor, 92, 249. 
Hume, 142. 
Huston, Lawrence, 39. 



Ingersoll, R. G., 249. 

Inner Circle, 2, 4; personnel of, 5; 

effects on, 5. 
Insanity, 95, 264 ; treated by music, 

201, 202. 
Inspiration, 94, 102, 110, 238. 
Instrument (Louis Benjamin), 6, 

26, 32, 91. 
Intuition, 178 et seq. 
Invisibility, 98. 



Jackes, Bertram, 1. 

James, Prof. Wm., 35, 36, 152. 

Japan, 247. 

Jester, in literature, 338 et seq. 



Jesus, 18, 91 et seq.; 143, 151, 204, 

338, 353, 355 et seq. 
Jiu jitsu, 261. 
Jonson, Ben, 278. 
Josephus, 254. 
Joy, 346; false, 347. 
Judas, 250. 
Justice, 97. 
Justinian, 158. 

K 

Kant, 81, 227. , 
Keller, Helen, 180. 
Kempis, Thomas a, 248. 
Kitchener, 252. 



Labour disputes, 169. 

Language, 92, 102, 219 et seq.; 
music as, 344. 

Law, 62. 

League of Nations, 161, 162, 255. 

Leibnitz, 87. 

Lessing, 146. 

Life, to lengthen, 102; directing, 
117. 

Limitations, 78; imaginary, 86. 

Lincoln, 165 et seq., 247. 

Literature, invisible, 207 et seq., 
211; lessons in, 334, 347. 

Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnifi- 
cent, 63, 65 et seq. 

Love, 55; importance of to health 
and beauty, 55, 81, 110, 120, 229, 
346. 

M 

Man, 89 ; definition of, 139 ; a phase 
of divine consciousness, 6; in 
government, 160. 

Mansions (planes), 107. 



372 



INDEX 



Marcus Aurelius, 250. 

Mary, of Bethany, 332; of Naza- 
reth, 333. 

Master, of Mother Group, 11; of 
life, 81. 

Maternal, Heart of the, 105 et seq. 

Matter, 237; definition of, 228 et 
seq. 

McKinley, 256. 

Meditation, 243 et seq. 

Mediums, reliability of, 99; sensi- 
tiveness of, 33. 

Melody, plane of, 199; basic 
melodies, 97. 

Memory, 91; after death, 22 et 
seq.; Hamilton on, 22. 

Mendelssohn, 146. 

Michel Angelo, 254. 

Mill, John Stuart, 248. 

Milton, 251, 334. 

Mind of man, 85 et seq. 

Miracles, the law of, 72, 337. 

Monoatom, the, 43, 223 et seq. 

Mother, the childless, 105, 112. 

Mother heart of God, 113. 

Motherhood, 113; preparation for, 
108; of God, 113; pensions for 
mothers, 168. 

Mother Group, 20, 139, 190; 
Master of, 19, 91. 

Mozart, 245. 

Music, 56, 96, 97, 198 et seq., 344; 
of wisdom, 204; of language, 
205; of spheres, 31; of the soul, 
205; used in healing, 261; a 
moral energy, 203; of life, 195; 
a plane, 199; relation to colour, 
202, 203; a universal language, 
371; lifts to higher plane with- 
out sleep, 203; universal com- 
positions, 205; should die while 
listening to music, 206. 



N 



Napoleon, 294. 

Nationalities, diversity of, 18. 

Neologism, 216. 

New age, 9, 167, 366. 

Newman, Cardinal, 241. 

New Thought, 60. 

Noise, evils of, 56. 

O 

Obsession, 100. 

Old Age, 238; pensions, 168; pre- 
mature, 78. 
Over Consciousness, 75 et seq. 



Paganini, 96, 199. 
Pain, 219. 
Palestine, 255, 333. 
Pater, Walter, 248. 
Persia, 255. 

Personality, 153; the focusing of 
God's, 139; stepping out of, 90. 
Personal questions, 8. 
Physical body, 53. 
Pilate, 94, 250. 
Plato, 142. 
Plausibility, 148, 149. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 34, 252. 
Poetry, 263. 
Prayer, 78. 
Prediction, 25, 174. 
Preparation star, 121. 
Prevision, 39, 174. 
Prologue, 17. 

Proportional representation, 169, 
Psychic criticism, 37. 
Psychometry, 54, 131. 
Purple rays, 98. 
Pythagoras, 92, 248. 



INDEX 



373 



Q 



Question and the answer, your, 91. 



R 



Rabelais, 339. 

Raleigh, Walter, 82. 

Recollection, astral, 42. 

Reconciliation, 101. 

Referendum, 169. 

Reincarnated soul, 182 et seq. 

Reincarnation, 145 et seq., 189, 308. 

Religions, weakness of, 364. 

Religious reconstruction, 169. 

Rembrandt, 34. 

Reporter, 2, 4, 5, 25, 259. 

Revelation, 20; nature of, 3, 16, 44; 
effects of, 2, 5, 10, 15; teaching 
of, 10; warrant of, 7; purpose 
of, 11; its demand, 363; neces- 
sity for, 364; continuity of, 366. 

Ruskin, 34, 251. 

Russia, music of, 57. 



Sacrifice, the supreme, 100. 

San Francisco, home of earth plane 

girl, 183, 185. 
Santa Claus, 130 et seq. 
Sappho, 53, 246, 289; fragments, 

266 et seq. 
Savonarola, 62 et seq., 92. 
School on higher planes, 121. 
Schopenhauer, 144. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 248. 
Serenity, 56, 80. 
Severn, the, 40. 
Shaw, Anna Howard, 288. 
Shakespeare, 52, 78, 81, 149, 150, 

187, 200, 210, 219, 273, 341. 



Shelley, 246, 292, 342. 

Silence, healing power of, 56; vocal 
silence, 30. 

Sin, the great, 82; how to elimi- 
nate, 80. 

Sleep, 47 et seq.; visiting higher 
planes during, 177, 188; defini- 
tion of, 47. 

Socrates, 142, 246. 

Sorrow, ministry of, 327 et seq.; 
248 et seq.; false, 351. 

Soul, the, 24, 57, 90; origin of, 108, 
177. 

Space, 227, 232. 

Sparta, 111. 

Spinoza, 92, 96, 143, 173, 246, 343. 

Spiritual gifts, how to develop, 
101. 

Spiritualism, 8, 92, 101. 

Sphere music, 31. 

Star, the message, 26. 

Stevenson, R. L., 253. 

St. Francis, 330. 

Still, Andrew Taylor, 259. 

St. John, 332. 

St. Mark's, 64. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 246, 292. 

St. Paul, 92, 329, 335. 

Subconscious mind, 75 et seq.; 87 
et seq. 

Subjective mind, 38. 

Subliminal mind, 87. 

Suggestion, 87. 

Super-energy, 235. 

Super-matter, 224. 

Swedenborg, 48, 346. 



Tagore, Rabindranath, 187. 

Taine, 247. 

Tasso, 275, 280, 347. 



874 



INDEX 



Telepathy, 182. 
Tennyson, 154, 246. 
Technique, musical, 199. 
Terminology, value of, (Pranic, 

manassic, etc.) 98. 
Thompson, Francis, 34. 
Thought, 89, 94, 214 et seq.; never 

hidden, 238. 
Thoreau, Henry D., 34, 255. 
Three powers, the, 297 et seq. 
Tobias, 34. 
Tolstoi, 13, 17. 
Truth, 130. 
Twentieth Plane, the, 8, 9, 19, 92; 

signal from, 27; distance of, 29. 

U 

United States, 255. 
Universe, the, 16, 43, 74, 176; 
forces of, 80; a brain, 90. 



Venus, 27, 28; distance of, 29. 



Vision, 102, 173. 
Void spaces, 232. 
Voltaire, 250. : 



W 



Wagner, 254. 

Watson, Mary Youle, 105, 119, 123, 

244, 245. 
Watts, Geo. F., 34^ 
Weber, 254, 
Weight, 237. 

Wilberforce, Bishop, 241. 
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 282, 287. 
Wilde, Oscar, 249. 
Willard, Frances, 249. 
Wilson, Oscar L., 33, 36. 
Wind, subsidence of, 30. 
Woman, 109, 110, 111, 114, 160. 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 182, 186 et 

seq.; 198, 273. 
Wordsworth, William, 182, 187, 

256. 







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